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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#331

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nyokodo wrote: post #326
hedora wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population shifts mean an ever-shrinking minority of the population can block changes to the constitution. It’s barely even double digits at this point. Constitutional amendments were supposed to be easier than right to rebellion. That’s not really the case any more. At the same time, the supreme court is just ignoring the law, over the objections of 66-75% of the population (depending on the ruling). These are dark…

> These are dark times for US democracy The US system has little d democratic aspects but it is not a democracy. It was intentionally setup to protect the minority from the majority in critical respects like constitutional amendments. Also, population shifts are ongoing and the coastal blue populations are the most rapidly aging in the country and the increasingly red US born Hispanic populations are the most rapidly…

> population shifts are ongoing and the coastal blue populations are the most rapidly aging in the country

But they also have longer lifespans by a couple of years.

> increasingly red US born Hispanic populations are the most rapidly growing.

A lot of those US born Hispanics are in California and very blue (thanks to Pete Wilson).

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#332

Post by kepler1 »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #317
kepler1 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

In my opinion the unacceptable, repetitive, fundamentalist-led attacks on the very institution of voting itself would take far more precedence than the social issues you listed, although I know social media leans hard on them. If you truly feel those are the most pressing issues in your mind/spheres, I would urge you to remember that social media is largely an echo chamber designed to distract from the actual issues,…

Please say what about voting has been fundamentally attacked at its core that rises to the level of amending the Constitution? That voters are required to (gasp) verify their identification, once every 4 years, if certain conditions aren't met? That drop boxes for ballots were reduced in number?

Gerrymandering? Just look at some of the district designs in New York.

I might remind you that all the things that are criticized in Republican states for suppressing the vote, exist as rules in certain Democratic states as well.

It's easy, I might point out to you as well, to live in an echo chamber where issues get inflated in perceived importance, only because they hurt your side. Yet those same issues happening where it doesn't hurt the side, somehow fall from being a problem.

That's no way to come to what should be an amendment to our basic document.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#333

Post by whiddershins »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #150
prottog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leve…

That literally what the federal government is for. Regulating interstate commerce.

(And common defense)

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#334

Post by dragonwriter »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #197
dragonwriter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Direct democracy does not work on a large scale. It maybe could with smart use of modern technologies, revocable proxies, and..., but that’s irrelevant because “adopt direct democracy for the US” is not even among the top 10 proposed alternatives to the current setup of the Electoral College.

I'm curious on what the current popular alternatives are. It does seem like most conversation focuses on direct democracy since it's fixated on respecting the popular vote.

> I’m curious on what the current popular alternatives are

Electing the President by national popular vote is by far the most commonly cited alternative.

> It does seem like most conversation focuses on direct democracy

It does not.

> since it’s fixated on respecting the popular vote.

Electing officials by popular vote is representative democracy, not direct democracy. Direct democracy is the citizens making policy decisions by popular vote, without elected officials as intermediaries (e.g., many U.S. states use some form of ballot initiative and/or referendum system, which are – limited forms, since they still have elected legislators do most lawmaking – direct democracy.)

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#335

Post by TeeMassive »

voltaireodactyl wrote: post #317
kepler1 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

In my opinion the unacceptable, repetitive, fundamentalist-led attacks on the very institution of voting itself would take far more precedence than the social issues you listed, although I know social media leans hard on them. If you truly feel those are the most pressing issues in your mind/spheres, I would urge you to remember that social media is largely an echo chamber designed to distract from the actual issues,…

> In my opinion the unacceptable, repetitive, fundamentalist-led attacks on the very institution of voting itself would take far more precedence than the social issues you listed

How are they attacked? From what I've seen, all the "voter suppression" stories coming from the US are all things we have in place in other modern democracies like in Canada. We have voter ID, we have to make sure we are registered, we can only ask for mail ballots for certain circumstances, voting machines are banned and we have move of the results before midnight.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#336

Post by seanmcdirmid »

lettergram wrote: post #287
cm2187 wrote: post #222

Author complains these amendments cannot be passed because of political polarisation. That polarisation is the very reason why those amendments shouldn't pass. You can only change the constitution if there is a consensus, by design. If you want to make a change that half the country is dead against, all the systems of balance of power will work against it (two chambers - one by headcount the other by states, filibust…

IMO "amendments" are made and also "ignored" via an unofficial process. For example, I can read the second amendment -- > A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. It is clear the national firearms act is outright unconstitutional by any sane reading, yet it was deemed "okay" by SCOTUS and passed by congress. The a…

The Supreme Court didn’t nullify the first clause of the second amendment until 2012. The thought that the right to bear arms was completely unrestricted didn’t exist for the first 200 years of the USA’s existence (including when the people who wrote it were still alive). That the Supreme Court was able to change the meaning of the amendment over time is a clear indication that literal interpretations of it really don’t exist.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#337

Post by briantakita »

briantakita wrote: post #215
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…

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 ta…

A corollary, which I have discovered with Philosophy, maintaining software, performing large-scale refactoring, etc. and many have discovered before me...

The primitive low-level tech opens the space to what is possible. Improving low level components opens up a large space of possibility that is often inconceivable at the time the improvement is done. The reverse is disimproving low level components restricts the range of possibilities.

This is why we have seen so much churn in the front end & application libraries. More recent programming languages and front end & application libraries have sought to improve the low level apis to improve the development context of complex software.

A more evolved system (e.g. version 3.0) built with worse components is bound by the lack of quality of it's underlying components. So if version 3.0 Constitution is built with disimprovements in version 2.0 or earlier, it could be rendered worse than a version 1.0 built with quality components & quality first principles.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#338

Post by rnk »

bitwize wrote: post #306
lettergram wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few reasons this broke down... 1. The 17th amendment (1912) - Electing senators by popular vote broke the state representation in the federal government. States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty. 2. The federal reserve act (1913) - enables government to self-fund by printing money and enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank. 3. The 16th amendment (1913) - Federal i…

Name the fucking enemy. Starts with a 'C' and ends in 'apitalism'. Read Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work . This is the way.

No post body was provided.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#339

Post by TeeMassive »

pasquinelli wrote: post #325
cm2187 wrote: post #222

Author complains these amendments cannot be passed because of political polarisation. That polarisation is the very reason why those amendments shouldn't pass. You can only change the constitution if there is a consensus, by design. If you want to make a change that half the country is dead against, all the systems of balance of power will work against it (two chambers - one by headcount the other by states, filibust…

> If you want to make a change that half the country is dead against, all the systems of balance of power will work against it (two chambers - one by headcount the other by states, filibuster, presidential veto, high threshold of consensus for changing the constitution), as it should. which is why prohabition never happened.

Crime virtually disappeared after Prohibition was passed until the apparition of organized crime.

At the time (and still to this day) alcohol and drugs made and destroyed empires. The Dutch Empire was based on Gin. The British Empire on Opium and Rhum. Russia on Vodka. France had Bourbon.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#340

Post by lettergram »

pasquinelli wrote: post #329
artificialLimbs wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with lettergram and disagree with naming capitalism as an 'enemy'. How do you think you're going to reduce poverty and create wealth without capitalism?

the ussr and china both developed from feudalism without capitalism and lifted a huge number of people out of poverty. not advocating their system, (not not-advocating either), but they are counter examples.

hmmm arguably capitalism was still required.

Both the USSR and China both went through (at different times!) great famines due to their collectivization of agriculture. Further, their agricultural practices in general were learned from the capitalist countries and neither produced / produce enough. Both the USSR and China did / currently rely heavily on food imports.

Arguably, they only escaped feudalism because capitalistic countries provided enough cheap food to the global market to transition their economies off of mass labor in fields (the basis of feudalism).

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