181–190 of 747 posts
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Or people just don't trade with California and California doesn't have any pork.
This is not how it normally works, and I suspect you know that.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-to-consider-toler...
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…
"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…
> 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…
Nit: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
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It's not about party success. Conservative values generally mean trying to keep things the same. A hard to change set of rules supports this. Progressive values generally mean trying to make changes [to improve society]. Being able to change rules supports this. We should therefore expect conservative people to want a hard to amend constitution and progressive people to want a easy to amend constitution, regardless o…
> Progressive values generally mean trying to make changes [to improve society]. So I think you are technically correct on the definition of progressive and conservative but I would take issue that the progressive side is always trying to change things to better society. After all prohibition, legalized lobotomies, and eugenics we're a big part of the progressive policy in the late 1800s and early 1900s, of course so…
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> It says practically nothing. Is that not the whole point? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
This basic fact eludes the intelligentsia who all assume that federal power is The Way Things Are (or Should Be). They assume it's the default position, when in fact the Framers intended it to be a bare-bones fallback for only basic things like the national defense.
So the federal government is essentially taxing the state's citizens, then giving some amount of it back to the states in exchange for rowing the boat in the right direction. States that increase their own taxes to compensate for refusal of federal funds would become noncompetitive to other states who don't.
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Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
> Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced. Arguably, the main problem with the original rules was bullet voting in the electoral college; if they voted with preference ballots with winner elimination, instead of bullet ballots, having the second place be the VP would work well, and produce less incumbent pr…
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Our Federal constitution is fairly concise Concise to the point of vacuous. It says practically nothing. It describes only the barest outlines of government, and effectively all of the actual implementation has been a matter of legislation, judicial decisions, and tradition. Individual words are scrutinized as if they will somehow be unambiguous if we stare at them long enough, or bring in enough cherry-picked outsid…
The Bill of Rights is particularly brilliant in its conciseness. A lawyer once said that "show me a contract that's one page, and I won't be able to break it. Show me one 20 pages long, and I'll break it."
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I don't think this is true. For instance, compare US defamation law to UK defamation law. The distinctions, which are large, are entirely because of the structure of our constitution. Or look at the rules of evidence in Europe, where you don't necessarily have a right to avoid self-incrimination, or to exclude evidence gained unlawfully.
All distinctions which were created by amendments
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…
The US Constitution is still the best one in the world. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java.
The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like version 5 or 6 now. (I'm making up numbers but you get the idea.)
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All distinctions which were created by amendments
IMO we should probably differentiate between the BOR and amendments which came later
Of the 27 amendments that have been ratified, the most recent was one of the twelve submitted as the Bill of Rights, so there are literally none that have come later. Sixteen have come in between (one from the BOR was never passed.)
Also, the most relevant amendment to the issues upthread, for most purposes in US law (since things like defamation law and most of the cases where the evidence differences matter are state, not federal) is the 14th, which is not part of the BOR.