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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

newyorker.com

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#371

Post by StanislavPetrov »

jonnybgood wrote: post #310
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A conspiracy theory is, by definition, a secret. That the government routinely ignores the Constitution isn't a conspiracy, just a sad fact. How many wars have we been in over the last 70 years? Vietnam? Korea? Iraq? Afghanistan? Just to name a very few. Read Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution. How many times has the Congress voted to go to war? Is this just a conspiracy, or another example of our government's d…

Legally speaking, what is a war? Can an event look like a war, but is not a war? What are the thresholds for calling an event a war? Is every event involving military action a war?

>Is every event involving military action a war?

Certainly not, which is why I only mentioned a few major foreign invasions that involved hundreds of thousands of our troops and killed millions of people.

>What are the thresholds for calling an event a war?

Reasonable people can argue over exactly what that threshold is, but nobody reasonable would deny that our invasions of Vietnam and Iraq qualify as wars.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#372

Post by somenameforme »

lettergram wrote: post #272
anonymousiam wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! In addition, the 10th amendment should prevent, but has not stopped Congress from passing most of the laws it has passed. https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/

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…

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

There's another critical date: 1971. That was the year that Nixon ended the Bretton Woods System. [1] Bretton Woods was a defacto global* monetary system. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was convertible to gold at a fixed rate. This created a sort of soft backing to the dollar.

After it ended the final constraint the 'government printing' (this is not an entirely accurate description of the process, but close enough for practical purposes) infinite money became a viable option; one which they have vigorously pursued since. The above link offers a number of fun graphs demonstrating the changes revolving about that date.

When a federal government can go tens of trillions of dollars in debt, that absolutely destroys any sort of economic normalcy. Because they can offer what's, from their perspective, monopoly money for real services while the rest of the economy is forced to use real money. This applies not only to businesses, but also states - which are constrained by financial realities.

I suspect when this current system we've created blows up, it's going to make 1929 look like a bull market.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#373

Post by jliptzin »

Nursie wrote: post #359
TeeMassive wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Voter suppression in the US appears to take on other forms, reducing the number of polling places in urban centres such that it can take several hours to cast a vote, restricting their hours, making it illegal to provide water for those in the queue, that sort of thing. Multi-pronged attacks which try to ensure only 'your' people get to participate. As an Australian resident and a British citizen, it seems outrageous…

Upvoted and also amazed that you know so much about what’s going on in US politics!

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#374

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

ETH_start wrote: post #361
crazygringo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

The real world data is extremely limited, given there are only ~200 countries in the modern era, and the huge span of time over which the full impact of a constitution is seen. It's incomparable to PLs, which have perhaps billions of case studies on which comparative analysis can be done.

Remind me how many PL's there are again.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#375

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

refurb wrote: post #292
germinalphrase wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system really should be balanced such that each President gets one nomination per term.

That’s not a terrible idea, but one can imagine both parties would game the change so that it takes effect while they’ve secured a multi-term presidency and a number of justices are retiring.

How do you secure a multiterm presidency?

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#377

Post by voltaireodactyl »

raydiatian wrote: post #369
TeeMassive wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> voting machines are banned I’m interested to hear your take on how voting machines are “less secure” than by-hand tallying. I’m unfamiliar with the process, so this goes contrary to what my intuition would tell me goes on

In the same way that email is easier to silently spoof/alter/discard than a handwritten letter. Voting machines without paper backup suffer the same vulnerabilities, with much greater cost, and significantly less money being put toward securing them.

A better question is: “what do digital only voting machines do BETTER than paper ballots?” I’m interested to hear your take!

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#378

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

whatthesmack wrote: post #341
jquery wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Thank you. As a disenfranchised Californian I will bang this gavel until I die. The loss of the SALT deduction hit our finances tremendously. 1. Direct impact via higher taxes. 2. People fleeing the state for lower tax states because without the SALT deduction, we have a race to the bottom infrastructure-wise (not that we didn’t already, but the SALT deduction dampened the effect somewhat). This is the kin…

Why should the rest of the country subsidize your state's more burdensome tax regime? Removal of the SALT deduction just brings the federal tax code a bit closer to neutrality. If you choose to live in a place with high taxes, that's fine, but don't expect everyone else to help subsidize it.

Narrow definition of "neutrality".

What you're really going for is that the required service provision level by states should be as low as possible, and if any states wish to exceed that, other states should not need to subsidize it.

Which would perhaps be OK if we had a better democracy, and the decision of a state to provide a very low level of public services truly reflected the desires of its inhabitants. However, all evidence points to the idea that states which actually operate at these lower levels also do their very best to limit the political influence of those would seek higher public service levels.

What you're actually doing is allowing the priviledge of wealth (and power) in some states to percolate up to the federal level to make it harder for other states (and their own) to respond to public desire.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#379

Post by _-david-_ »

wincy wrote: post #345
dylan604 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it was tried and "failed" once before doesn't mean that people don't still believe that it can be tried and made to work the next time. The concept of a split US is not unattractive to a much larger number of people than you might be willing to give credit. There's also the people that will support a movement not because they fully support it, but mainly just because it's screwing the "system" and watchi…

Could a state democratically elect to secede from the union? What if a National vote was held and a majority agreed to split up the USA? At what point could we democratically all agree we think the other side is crazy, and ask to peacefully take our ball and go home?

The 10th amendment basically says any power not granted to the federal government and not banned by the Constitution is left to the state. Secession is never mentioned in the Constitution and as such states have every right to vote to leave.

The Supreme Court has previously erroneously ruled that the federal government had the authority to stop it despite that power not having been granted to the federal government.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#380

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #346
int_19h wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Articles of Confederation were 1-state-1-vote, and we've seen how that ended. The Founders explicitly rejected that approach when drafting the Constitution, and documented their reasons: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed22.asp "The right of equal suffrage among the States is another exceptionable part of the Confederation. Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to conde…

Under the Articles of Confederation all decisions were made by a vote of the states. The Constitution has a very different structure. Most of the power resides in Congress that the people control. The Electoral College is solely selecting the executive not deciding Constitutional questions. The people are represented by the House and assert their will that way. The apportionment of representatives should be changed s…

> Returning the Senate to selection by state legislature also solves the complaint of unequal representation in the senate.

?? Wyoming would still have 2 senators, just like California. How does that help in any way?

> Representing the people isn't supposed to be the purpose of the senate.

For many of us, that's precisely the problem. The role of the government is the representation of the people, and to the extent that the senate fails to do that, it is a failed part of the government.

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