Earlier quoted context omitted.
There seems to be a function missing from government. All governments, AFAICT. Legislators change the law (including, rarely, the constitution) — effectively by applying a hierarchy of "countermanding orders" — to suit the changing interests of the public. Courts interpret the law, but only downstream of legislation. The executive can make regulation and executive orders, but only in agreement with the law. But at th…
That’s what Constitutional amendments are for, and it’s happened 27 times in the history of the US, most recently in 1992. The corporate media doesn’t typically like to talk about that process since it is a threat to the entrenched powers that be. The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures. We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perce…
Yes, you'll note that I said "the data will lead to a mandate for a constitutional amendment." My point is that the mechanisms that create and ratify constitutional amendments are broken for this purpose; not that we need a thing other than constitutional amendments.
Given the actual way bipartite or tripartite governments (at all levels — from municipal to federal) function in the real world, constitutional amendments only happen when there's a need to use an amendment to overridingly countermand law.
Constitutional amendments are almost never used for their original designed purpose — to pre-empt the ability to create law — because the legislative process is purely reactive, never proactive. Legislatures the world over only act when either corporate lobbying interests or outraged citizens demand they act.
The thing I'm saying doesn't exist, is a proactive branch of government that turns things that are currently "known to be desirable" but not yet "outraged about being taken away", into constitutional amendments protecting those things, before some law can be made somewhere that violates the implicit, intuitional, self-evident, but previously non-applicable right that the public believes it has. Like a right to anonymity in cash transactions.
Until a decade or two ago, nobody ever considered that "being able to transact anonymously via cash" needed to be thought of as a right. It was simply the only way things worked. There were no clear examples of it not working that way elsewhere in the world to serve as object lessons on why you'd need such a law.
Or, consider prohibition. Did the US really need to issue the 18th amendment, struggle for two decades, and then issue the 21st amendment to repeal it... when anyone who lived in America at any time during the two centuries before the rise of the temperance movement, could have seen that the public actually seems to consider itself to have a self-evident right to ingest mind-altering substances — and thereby, that there should be a constitutional limitation on laws which prohibit the production and sale of mind-altering substances? Yet America still doesn't have a constitutional amendment enshrining that self-evident right. Because there's no system for discovering "latent" public sentiment and enshrining it. If everybody thinks something, but nobody says that thing, then it never becomes law.
(If you think it's dumb to care about what "everyone thinks but nobody says" — why do you think democracy is built on secret voting? The public has a lot of things they want but aren't willing to say they want in front of others, for fear of reprisal in their local social-normative environment — including who they think would best represent them democratically!)
To your other points:
> The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures.
Legislatures at all levels are purely reactive; and therefore can't react to latent public sentiment, only to active demands.
> We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived problem with itself
What about every other democratic nation in the world that doesn't have this problem? (I'm Canadian, myself.) While America makes a good example for the failings of the reactive model for constitutional amendment, adding a proactive pipeline from latent public sentiment to constitutional amendment would be a change applicable to every country with a constitution. Not just democracies, actually; even constitutional monarchies.
That being said — everything I'm saying also applies, in the US, to state governments and their state charters/constitutions/other founding documents. State governments could have such a proactive body just like federal governments could. City governments could have such a proactive body. Heck, even corporations could have a proactive body to enshrine the interests of shareholders into the corporation's charter! (I bet there are corporations whose employees and shareholders would all prefer the corporation be transitioned to a B Corp with certain values held above profit — just not with enough outrage to consolidate a voice to make any coherent demands of the board of directors.)