481–490 of 747 posts
Call an Article V Convention per https://conventionofstates.com/ and belie The Famous Article. Americans will line up behind fiscal reform and a rejection of our globalist overlords.
I'm not excited about it (and I agree with your last 5 words). It's too easy to subvert. We have so much history, see the SC link I put in the thread. The states are a much safer venue.
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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 entire…
This is an entirely inaccurate description of the process. Only countries were allowed to purchase gold for $35 an ounce, with the assumption that they would also "buy" $35 with an ounce of gold. This would ordinarily be considered a bad deal because the dollar had already drastically inflated since 1934, but Europe and Japan were desperate for liquidity to rebuild from WWII, so they were happy to trade physical gold for what was essentially slips of paper. When the US noticed that they were increasingly trying to trade these slips of paper into gold, the US ended the ability to do so. Saying that the end of Bretton Woods was a bad decision is really just saying that you want the US to instantly become bankrupt.
There is no reason to peg your currency to an arbitrary metal. If the government wanted to stop itself from printing money, it would simply stop printing money. Bretton Woods was actually a weaker protection against "printing money" than say a debt ceiling because Nixon was able to reverse kill Bretton Woods single handedly, whereas raising the debt ceiling requires an act from Congress.
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Watching this play out (as a non-US person), there’s very little comfort in the distinction between court ignoring the law and the court interpreting the law in a way that is different to historic precedent. The act of interpretation infers that the court is making some kind of justification – backing these changes up by explaining them. Typically this would happen via written decision or at least by stare decisis. B…
> The fire in a crowded theatre standard was overturned… According to Wikipedia that standard was explicitly upheld as the example of speech that would be prosecuted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
Alito claimed* that the 'fire in a crowded theatre' standard should be applied to today's college campuses, essentially because he has strong views on how free speech should/shouldn't be regulated at college. It seems to me that he's taking issue specifically with the right of students to engage in political speech and protest. The current court seems to have a particular distaste for case law from the civil rights era. I think he's deciding to bring this exact issue up because he wants to signal to any prospective plaintiff what rulings and precedents the court is likely to focus on in a hypothetical case. But he did that by deliberately misapplying the relevance of a widely-known and easily-misunderstood civil rights-era standard. It feels like he's doing that to taunt his political opponents and signal his preference for an earlier legal regime.
My point is that it's fair to question whether the court is actually behaving like a legislature: it's concentrating on case law that specifically affects social policy and it's doing that because it has a majority's muscle. As a foreigner, I can't explain how insane this looks from outside. Judges don't get to just show up to cocktail parties or speeches and single out the precedents they'd prefer to ignore or dispense with. That's a politician's job.
* https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/justice-alito-takes-di...
The constitution is perfectly easy to amend when we have consensus. The problem is achieving consensus. I don’t think making the constitution easier to amend would make it any easier to achieve national consensus.
The Constitution requires 3/4 of state legislatures to ratify any amendment. Given the extreme disparities between states in terms of population, it's entirely possible for something to be supported by >80% of the people - I'd say that reasonably qualifies as "consensus" - but still unable to be ratified. Conversely, it's possible for the small states representing less than 25% of the overall population to band toget…
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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…
I would add that if you are a fan of courts protecting minority rights not subject to the whims and abuses of majorities, you should be grateful that judges are not democratically elected.
P.S. minorities here could mean anything i.e the mega rich, the “legal” cartels, etc.
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Yes, it might not need to be re- written so much as it needs to be re- read .
You wrote something much better than I I wonder if general knowledge of civics and an understanding of the US Constitution has escaped from much of school?
For the high school civics question, I got a lot of exposure to the what, but none of the why really landed for me until much later.
It’s far easier to test that I can regurgitate facts about three branches, a bicameral legislature, the amendment process, the Bill of Rights, 13/14/15, 18/21, but far harder to test my grasp of balancing the will of the slim majority vs the freedom of the slim minority.
Further, middle and high schoolers don’t have fully developed brains nor the life experience of making hard decisions and needing a framework when a far-reaching decision must be made but no decision will leave everyone happy.
I may have learned more about the why of the Constitution in a college philosophy class on liberty and justice than I did in middle/high school civics.
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Supreme Court rulings are not a popularity contest. It’s intended as an independent (as independent a nominated body can be) that interprets the laws the Congress passes within the confines of the Constitution. I for one would fear living in a country where the courts were swayed by public sentiment.
It’s hardly an independent body when 67% of members are lifetime political appointees from a party that hasn’t represented a national majority in several decades.
For example, Amy Barrett was confirmed by a vote of 55-43, including 3 Democrats.
I'm not sure why you mention "a national majority". It was never a popularity contest. States elect senators, senators confirm Supreme Court justices.
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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?
It's not guaranteed, but you can usually guess when Presidents are popular enough to stick around for 2 terms.
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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…
Ruth Badger Ginsburg should be a Supreme Court Justice on a kids show filled with animals who makes landmark decisions the real Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have proud of.
Your own link contains my very point: the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is a modern piece of human rights legislation. RBG specifically calls out the Charter, not the Canadian constitution as a whole.
The Charter is like the US Bill of Rights, a small section of a larger document dealing specifically with civil rights. The rest of the Canadian constitution is a messy bit of parliamentary wrangling from across 2 centuries delegating the country of Canada into existence and separating it from the UK.
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> I’m interested to hear your take! Don’t really have one, I’m more interested in a study of which protocol is more secure, higher integrity. Gut instinct is that voting machines have a longer/stronger audit chain, are automated & don’t get tired. But of course, auditors get tired and aren’t automated, then again, is voting software “really that hard?”. But then again that audit chain could be stupid and expensive an…
I understand your points and concerns but I believe you are operating under the assumption that paper ballots must be counted by human auditors. This is not the case. The issue lies not with automated systems, but in a total reliance upon them, without paper fallback. The system functions ideally like a scantron system for tests — that is , a standardized bubble form (like a ballot), is read by a machine, which talli…