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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#121

Post by nathanaldensr »

joshuamorton wrote: post #28
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

At this point, is the difficulty in amending the Constitution actually a bug? Seeing the polarization, I could see our Founding Fathers deciding that's actually a feature right now because it prevents one side from getting the upper hand and telling the rest to stuff it.

Yes, because it leaves constitutional meaning up, not up to the people, but up to the whims of the supreme court. The easiest way to amend the constitution is to hold or pack the supreme court. That is dysfunctional. An easier to amend constitution, that better reflected the people's will, would likely reduce political polarization, as it would be possible to actually pass national laws that have 60 or 70% support.

The Constitution does not represent the People's will; it represents the States' will. Amendments are not passed by popular vote. The Constitution is not a human rights document; it is a document created specifically to allow the States to agree on certain baseline rights and expectations.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#122

Post by jfengel »

akomtu wrote: post #98
jfengel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Equal Rights Amendment would have been nice. A Supreme Court member did say that without it, the Constitution does not prohibit discrimination based on sex. There are certain rights that are broadly popular, such as the right to birth control and the right to be gay, which are currently only protected by Supreme Court judgment. A member of that court explicitly called for reconsidering them. They are so broadly a…

This equal rights principle is implied by "all men are created equal" and both parties would support the explicit amendment, maybe for different reasons. The red camp wants to end "affirmative" action, while the blue camp wants to affirm rights of minorities. I guess the wording of the amendement is what would cause a fight.

Scalia disagreed. He says only purpose of the 14th amendment was to make sure slaves were on equal footing. If women had rights they wouldn't have needed an amendment to vote.

He's dead but at least five people almost certainly agree with him.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#123

Post by jfengel »

prottog wrote: post #112
jfengel wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas didn't just single out Obergefell. He also mentioned Lawrence v Texas, which overturned sodomy laws. And Griswold, which lets you pay for birth control with your own money. It says nothing about the public paying for it.

> Griswold You're right -- I was thinking of more recent cases that expanded upon Griswold. Thank you for reminding me. As I understand it, Justice Thomas's mentioning of Lawrence v. Texas and other laws "to be revisited", so to speak, were limited to the application of substantive due process in arriving at those judgments, and not necessarily to reverse the outcome of those judgments.

That's right. He just wants to take those old cases out for a spin, give 'em a tune up, kick the tires a bit. No chance he'd take away some rights that George Washington didn't put explicitly in the Constitution.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#124

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dragonwriter wrote: post #77
cvwright wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by random luck.

> No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by randon luck Yes, to the extent that the US had more peace and prosperity than, say, European states, most intelligent people with even modest knowledge attribute that not to random chance but to three major factors: (1) The Pacific Ocean, (2) The Atlantic Ocean, (3) The extremely small number of remotely near-peer powers that hav…

The point was governmental stability, not protection against invasion. If you look at, say, France, in the same time they've had their revolution, then Napoleon, then back to monarchy, then back and forth with republics and emperors and such. They're now on the fifth version of their republic.

In the same time, the US has had the Civil War, and January 6. That's "relative peace and prosperity".

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#126

Post by int_19h »

D13Fd wrote: post #125

The constitution is perfectly easy to amend when we have consensus. The problem is achieving consensus. I don’t think making the constitution easier to amend would make it any easier to achieve national consensus.

The Constitution requires 3/4 of state legislatures to ratify any amendment. Given the extreme disparities between states in terms of population, it's entirely possible for something to be supported by >80% of the people - I'd say that reasonably qualifies as "consensus" - but still unable to be ratified.

Conversely, it's possible for the small states representing less than 25% of the overall population to band together and ratify any constitutional amendment - and it would be binding on the rest of the country.

It really is a broken system through and through.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#127

Post by AnimalMuppet »

D13Fd wrote: post #125

The constitution is perfectly easy to amend when we have consensus. The problem is achieving consensus. I don’t think making the constitution easier to amend would make it any easier to achieve national consensus.

And when we don't have consensus, is it really a bug if we can't amend the constitution? One could argue that it's correct behavior.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#128

Post by dogmatism »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #61
tptacek wrote: post #33

It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…

>"Lepore talks about national abortion, immigration, and firearms policy and how they'd be impacted by a more readily-amended Constitution, but I think she should take a wider view and look at things like how speech and free association would be impacted." I feel like the author is looking at using amendments as a way to implement legislation that is permanent. Our Federal constitution is fairly concise, whereas some…

I lived in Alabama for quite some time. For anyone not reading the wikipedia article (and tbh, I haven't either, but am quite familiar with it's constitution) it was expressly written to consolidate power in the "planter" rich, white, ruling class and take power from both Blacks and lower SES whites, with a bit of a sop to the more independent farmers of the North Alabama hills (remember this was a time of far from universal suffrage) The result was that most cities and counties don't have a lot of direct control, and any little thing has go through the amendment process: e.g. this year question 8 on the ballot refers to Shelby county's regulation of sewer rates

It's a shitshow through and through

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#129

Post by karaterobot »

D13Fd wrote: post #125

The constitution is perfectly easy to amend when we have consensus. The problem is achieving consensus. I don’t think making the constitution easier to amend would make it any easier to achieve national consensus.

Well said. The issue (as noted in the article) is party politics. The solution is not to make it easier for whatever party happens to be in power to wield it like a bludgeon, or to throw away the concept of representative democracy and run the government like a twitter poll. The idea that we should keep the parties and the tribalism, but ditch the requirement that we learn how to compromise with each other, is completely wrong.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#130

Post by jaybrendansmith »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #52

I think the single biggest vulnerability of the constitution, which they had no chance of predicting, is mass media and the way it changed the dynamics of politics. Today it is a mediacracy undergoing a violent phase transition from tv and newspapers traditional media control to social media and search algorithms. At the root of the problem is that the media is owned by very few oligopolies, and they answer to no one…

This. The propaganda of the media, both intentional and accidental, is impacting our Democracy more than I would have thought possible. Being a critical thinker, I made the classic error of assuming that others could not easily be duped, and would actually do their own research on the issues. Boy was I wrong. We are all entitled to our own opinions, but we cannot survive as a Democracy if the citizenry believe they are entitled to their own FACTS. This is truly the challenge of the present, and I feel we are going to shortly lose our Democracy to bad actors who are more than willing to use our own intellectual weaknesses against us.
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