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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

newyorker.com

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#211

Post by lp0_on_fire »

Georgelemental wrote: post #183
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 equal-number-of-senators-per-state is the one thing that the Constitution explicitly forbids changing by amendment, the last clause of Article V. Nit: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."

I'm curious what scenarios were discussed in Philadelphia that they thought a state would willingly give up equal suffrage in the Senate?

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#212

Post by anon291 »

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.

Yet most democracies in the world use an electoral college to elect the head of government and it works great. They just call it a parliament.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#214

Post by lupire »

dragonwriter wrote: post #190
Rebelgecko wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO we should probably differentiate between the BOR and amendments which came later

> 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…

Silly nitpicks don't change the fact the first 10 amendments were passed in 1791.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#215

Post by briantakita »

crazygringo wrote: post #189
WalterBright wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually it's not. 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 ver…

It depends on whose interests are being served. In software, version 1.0 could be what made the project successful with the user-base while subsequent versions introduce features which help other entities such as advertisers & the interests of anonymous share-holders to extract profit & control from the user-base. Sometimes, popular features, such as an open api, are removed to consolidate the market as well.

I'll take a version 1.0 which is focused on reifying the natural God-given rights of man vs version 3.0 which reifies power of the State & Corporate "persons" over man.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#216

Post by dragonwriter »

WalterBright wrote: post #177
jfengel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

So, by your standard, the Bill of Rights can’t be “broken” by a lawyer, that is, they can’t get a court to apply it in something other than the intended manner. But virtually every significant phrase in the Bill of Rights has been applied in multiple different ways by different courts over the years, so clearly lawyers have had no trouble breaking it.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#217

Post by joshuamorton »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #121
joshuamorton wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is a bug, not a feature. A government that privileges certain arbitrary subdivisions over the citizenry is not great, and there's a reason that while many parts of the US constitution have been copied, that one hasn't.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#218

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

WalterBright wrote: post #181
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how it normally works, and I suspect you know that.

That's how it works for San Francisco, which is turning out to be not so good for the SF citizens: https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-to-consider-toler...

The toleration of intolerance has always been a thorny philosophical problem.

The WSJ article is clearly written as an homage to The Onion.

Finally, San Francisco is not a big enough market to swing anything (or almost anything). California is, particularly if there are at least a few producer states whose sympathies lie in the general direction the CA is trying to push (e.g. with vehicle emissions).

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#219

Post by crazygringo »

ETH_start wrote: post #201
crazygringo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's not. 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 ver…

You can't compare Constitutions to programming languages in terms of the prevailing consensus on their utility. While the latter has a vast test bed of real world utilization that reveals PL efficacy, the former can only be evaluated from the standpoint of theory, with a heavy heap of ideology.

You don't think academics are constantly comparing the real world utilization of constitutional forms...? Allow me to introduce to you, comparative politics:

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

Lest you think this is ideological or theoretical, no -- it's entirely about collecting data of real-world political operation, how similar or different constitutional structures result in similar or different outcomes given similar or different populations and histories.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#220

Post by kelseyfrog »

trelane wrote: post #203
crazygringo wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's not. 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 ver…

Ah, interesting. How many have they tried experimentally?

Parliamentary systems are generally considered more stable than presidential systems and tend to more naturally express multiparty politics (Australia and UK not withstanding).

Even while many people in the US might like the things a parliamentary system has to offer, there is no viable way to transition to one culturally. As much Americans hate how politics works presently, they hate the idea of replacing it even more. The socio-cultural hesitancy is real, paradoxical, and cannot be ignored.

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