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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#141

Post by floxy »

int_19h wrote: post #126
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 toget…

>it's possible for the small states representing less than 25% of the overall population to band together and ratify any constitutional amendment

I took the 2020 Census population figures from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

...and came up with the 38 smallest states (75% of 50) had a total population of 134 million or 40.5% of the U.S. population; the largest 12 states had a combined population of 197 million (59.5% of the U.S. population).

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#142

Post by midoridensha »

dahdum wrote: post #79
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…

> If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. True in the very short term, but that's only because neither party really targets the popular vote. Both would realign their platform and bases accordingly, and we'd just end up with a new system with new flaws. However, if you are correct, that would mean a de facto…

You wouldn't get a one-party state. The US did this before: back in the 1800s, there were 2 parties, the Whigs and the Democratic-Republicans. The Whigs imploded, so the other party broke in 2, yielding the two present-day parties.

If the GOP were to collapse and die out (as it should), the Democratic Party would simply break in 2, creating two new parties: the left-wing/progressive party and the center-right party. The former would champion all kinds of social causes and the latter would be the pro-business party.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#143

Post by midoridensha »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #108
tastyfreeze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senators were meant to represent each state's government not the people directly. The Senate, by being once removed from the people, was supposed to take a longer more measured view on issues. The 17th Amendment[1] broke that and made senators elected by the people. The people have the House. The House has also been broken over time. In 1929 the House was capped at 435 members. Since then the number of people that a…

> Doing away with the Electoral College and going for a direct democracy is a recipe for disaster. Direct democracy does not work on a large scale. This is a talking point that doesn't make any sense. Electing the president and vice president by popular vote is not "direct democracy". It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders.

>It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders.

And which countries are those?

Russia Turkey El Salvador Philippines

Not exactly paragons of democracy.

Face it: the Presidential system itself is a disaster. A Parliamentary system is what you want if you want a democratic country with high-quality governance.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#144

Post by woodruffw »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #120
woodruffw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some difficulty is not a bug, but the current amount of difficulty was probably not intended. Most of the drafters understood that it was important for a government's founding document to strike a balance between two unsustainable positions: immutability (leading to a sort of tyranny of the old and dead) and excessive mutability (leading to short-term thinking and political instability). Our current approach to amend…

How?

How what?

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#145

Post by dllthomas »

dragonwriter wrote: post #114
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…

> One other note, the equal-number-of-senators-per-state is the one thing that the Constitution explicitly forbids changing by amendment, the last clause of Article V. It doesn't forbid it, it just requires states losing equal representation to consent to the change. Of course, it also doesn’t limit, say, reducing the powers of the Senate, including transferring them entirely to either the House of Representatives or…

And you could maybe get away with changing it with two amendments, one that removed the restriction and another that changed the Senate.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#146

Post by stevenwoo »

midoridensha wrote: post #143
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing away with the Electoral College and going for a direct democracy is a recipe for disaster. Direct democracy does not work on a large scale. This is a talking point that doesn't make any sense. Electing the president and vice president by popular vote is not "direct democracy". It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders.

>It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders. And which countries are those? Russia Turkey El Salvador Philippines Not exactly paragons of democracy. Face it: the Presidential system itself is a disaster. A Parliamentary system is what you want if you want a democratic country with high-quality governance.

Just please without the weaknesses of the UK system, Boris Johnson, Theresa May Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak in short order with mostly only input from hardcore party members is terrible form of democracy. The Lords system also is pretty bad as well though of less importance now versus something like US Senate.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#147

Post by Arainach »

midoridensha wrote: post #143
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing away with the Electoral College and going for a direct democracy is a recipe for disaster. Direct democracy does not work on a large scale. This is a talking point that doesn't make any sense. Electing the president and vice president by popular vote is not "direct democracy". It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders.

>It is how virtually every other representative democracy with a presidential system elects their executive leaders. And which countries are those? Russia Turkey El Salvador Philippines Not exactly paragons of democracy. Face it: the Presidential system itself is a disaster. A Parliamentary system is what you want if you want a democratic country with high-quality governance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_system_of...

The list is far longer than that.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#148

Post by hot_gril »

jimmytidey wrote: post #41
george-in-sd wrote: post #16

Russia and China recently amended their constitution to ensure their respective leaders can stay in power permanently. Having some unchangeable bedrock in a country seems very valuable as we are all vulnerable to tyrants at some point in history.

I think I'd take the opposite lesson from these examples: if an individual gets sufficiently powerful, they will change the constitution irrespective of how much you formally considered it an 'unchangeable bedrock'.

Yeah, but it's a lot harder.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#149

Post by chiefalchemist »

> An unamendable constitution is not an American tradition. U.S. state constitutions are much easier to amend than the federal Constitution.

This is the problem and the solution. The more power and control that's been forfeited to the Federal gov, the less and less effective that entity has become. Yet the less effective it becomes the more push there is to give more power to Washington DC.

The solution is simple. Return - at least temporarily - to more of a pre New Deal mindset.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#150

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

prottog wrote: post #63
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…

The cap on the size of the House should be lifted, so that an approximately equal number of people are represented by each representative, no matter what state you live in. I don't see the problem in both California and Wyoming getting two senators, since that's (as you mention) precisely the point of the Senate. It's very deliberately built in to the American political system that the will of the half-plus-one major…

> Let's have fifty vibrant laboratories of democracy.

They'll need to stop trading with each other, then.

cf. current CA legislation that will make it hard/impossible for other states to sell pork in CA that was not raised in accordance with CA law.

Now, I happen to agree with the CA legislation, and would love it to cause a change in pork rearing nationwide. But you have to see the writing on the wall: with the level of economic inter-connectedness we have today, either large-market states get to dictate policy, or you need a higher-level body that takes charge of this sort of thing.

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