441–450 of 747 posts
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.
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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…
It may appear that way, especially if someone doesn't make it their life's work. But although concise, it is rich in meaning. You call out Article III, for example, so I'll focus on that. It doesn't say "we should have a Supreme Court and other courts Congress may establish." It says the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in them, and that judges shall be appointed. It isn't magisterial or clerical p…
Congress should not get to seat its own checks and balances, and it doesn't particularly matter if Congress is only allowed to establish and ordain inferior courts to that of the Supreme Court, if they already effectively establish and ordain the Supreme Court's delegations - and thereby its power.
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As a Canadian I'd be surprised to learn our constitution was considered top notch by legal scholars. The amendment process is very onerous. 7/10 provinces haven't ever really agreed on the colour of the sky, let alone something as important as new constitutional rules. It took some very special backroom wrangling to pass it in the first place and I don't see a path to amending it during my lifetime. Meech Lake came c…
My source for Canada and South Africa is Ruth Badger Ginsburg. She suggested insurrectionists in Egypt emulate the South African and Canadian Constitutions, rather than the US Constitution. She wasn’t insulting the US Constitution, just emphasizing it’s the product of circumstances that didn’t apply to Egypt. Seems like the Canadian Constitution is similarly constructed - taking the specific time, place, customs into…
> My source for Canada and South Africa is Ruth Badger Ginsburg.
So just the one legal scholar then?
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No, it was because the slave states didn't want to lose slavery in a Senate vote. If you think CA is too populous for it's people deserve an equal vote, CA should be 6 states. But the slavers fought that too (Missouri Compromise). State boundaries are legal constructs inherited from obsolete aristocracy, not meaningful cultural boundaries. It makes no sense to solve a hypothetical tyranny of large states by replacing…
> No, it was because the slave states didn't want to lose slavery in a Senate vote. Sorry, that is simply not true. Virginia, a slave state, was by far the most populous state at the time the Constitution was adopted.
Only if you count slaves and I don't see why you would in this context.
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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's a version of the English Bill of Rights 1689 so I'm not sure where you get the idea it's version one as the 1689 one wasn't even version one for England.
THAT'S where the "V.1" honor comes from.
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On what issues are we going to reach a breaking point that calls for Constitutional change?
I firmly believe it'll be a catalyst that reminds "The People" that they were MEANT to be the fourth check and balance, and that the check and balance system was NOT abstracted for just political institutions to provide leverage against each other's tension. The founder of the idea of "checks and balances" themselves (Montesquieu, Secondat) said it, the Founding Fathers who were influenced by the two (Madison) wanted…
To be honest I don't think that in these past ~250 years we've made that big of a progress in answering those two fundamental questions. I mean, the US Constitution starts with the very rousseau-ist "We the People of the United States", but a major part of the population living in said United States wasn't considered (fully) part of said People until the mid-19th century, some say that even now that process is an ongoing project.
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> 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?
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> Why does all the "nation building" around the world by the United States never result in a US style constitution, but seemingly inevitably in something closer to the German one? Then again, US nation building tends to be an abysmal failure (though, tbf, constitutional structure is not high on the list of defensible reasons for that.)
The nation building after WW2 for Germany & Japan worked out rather well.
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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…
The Supreme Court is, in no sense of the word, ignoring the law. They are interpreting the laws in ways you disagree with and in ways which have historically not been how it was interpreted by the same court, but this is not what ignoring means. Further, the objections of the population have nothing to do with the judicial branch and everything to do with the legislative branch. The courts are not and have never been…
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> refusing to compromise Unfortunately the left has won in this regard. The left moves so hard and fast to the left that even the right can no longer "refuse to compromise." If they don't, they are bigots at worst and uncultured, out of touch imbeciles at best.
As somebody not from the US, the mainstream "left" seems very right wing. When compared to the rest of the world, there is no left wing political party in the United States.
We're talking about the US.