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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

newyorker.com

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#521

Post by DebtDeflation »

closeparen wrote: post #314
nathanaldensr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This basic fact eludes the intelligentsia who all assume that federal power is The Way Things Are (or Should Be). They assume it's the default position, when in fact the Framers intended it to be a bare-bones fallback for only basic things like the national defense.

The economy turns out to be a pretty big deal, and Commerce Clause aside, states by design have little leverage over it: their borders being open, capital can always just head next door. Small federal government is basically equivalent to right-libertarian economic policy. In an alternate universe you might see liberals content to build welfare states at state level, but in this one it's not really an option. The fra…

>The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution

They were well before radio, TV, internet, trains, automobiles, airplanes, nuclear power, and many other things that do not strictly respect state lines. "Leave most decisions to the states" made a lot of sense in 1789 but we live in a different world now.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#522

Post by knewter »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #370
akiselev wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>* Well, checks and balances in the American constitution were founded on the idea that there would be no "factions" (parties), and so the three branches (legislative, executive, judicial) would balance each other without any single group ever taking over.* I’m not a constitutional scholar but I take issue with that characterization. Federalist #10 by James Madison is all about factions, how they are inevitable, and…

Jamelle Bouie (NYT) is something of a constitutional scholar (albeit of the popular book based variety) and he would eviscerate your argument. Recent pieces by him in NYT explain specifically why Madison's ideas about factions are not ideas about political parties. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=bouie+s...

He's responding to a comment that explicitly called factions parties

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#523

Post by rayiner »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #421
tptacek wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we used a nationwide popular vote, the GOP would just run someone closer to the median of their House delegation, which consistently does win the popular vote. Sounds pretty great to me.

Yeah! As long as we have fptp elections there will be two parties each getting about 50% of the vote, because they will evolve to be competitive. The question is just should that 50% line be about the middle of all citizens, or should that “middle” be randomly skewed towards people who happen to live nearer to farms.

That’s not the only “question.” We’re a federation of 50 sovereign states, not a single state. You can’t just sweep that part under the rug. In general, people tend to get really upset when you act like certain lines on the map just don’t exist.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#524

Post by denton-scratch »

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…

Java? I wouldn't dream of writing the software equivalent of a modern constitution in Java.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#525

Post by christophilus »

tptacek wrote: post #33

It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…

> the rigidity of the Constitution is probably it's greatest strength

Yeah. I’m with you there. It’s that way by design along with things like the presidency not having ultimate power.

The system’s not perfect, but let any modern politician make substantive changes, and I’d bet heavily on the system getting worse.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#526

Post by christophilus »

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."

Yep. It’s like software in that sense. Show me a concise program, and I may be able To find some bugs. Show me a complicated behemoth, and I guarantee it.

The founders understood the nature of power, and thus the importance of decentralization and diversity.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#527

Post by humanrebar »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #188
hammock wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All distinctions which were created by amendments

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

Universal suffrage amendments came later and we like those too.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#528

Post by rayiner »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #521
closeparen wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economy turns out to be a pretty big deal, and Commerce Clause aside, states by design have little leverage over it: their borders being open, capital can always just head next door. Small federal government is basically equivalent to right-libertarian economic policy. In an alternate universe you might see liberals content to build welfare states at state level, but in this one it's not really an option. The fra…

>The framers were well before the Industrial Revolution They were well before radio, TV, internet, trains, automobiles, airplanes, nuclear power, and many other things that do not strictly respect state lines. "Leave most decisions to the states" made a lot of sense in 1789 but we live in a different world now.

I don’t really buy this. Somehow Europe manages pretty well with much smaller and more granular country level decision making units.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#529

Post by brigandish »

HaZeust wrote: post #445
brigandish wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1689 was only 4 years into Enlightenment, and the collective recognition of "personal rights" that is most-often cited as the Enlightenments greatest achievement also just happens to be a fundamental aspect of 1789 Constitution - and ALL Constitutions moving forward. THAT'S where the "V.1" honor comes from.

Aside from it being utterly irrelevant when the Enlightenment started as to whether the Bill of Rights 1689 was a precursor to the 1789 ones, how does John Locke fit into that choice of start date for the Enlightenment?

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#530

Post by denton-scratch »

indymike wrote: post #512
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 don’t write low level, close to the hardware software with Python or Java. You use something like C, Rust or assembler. Constitutions are the firmware. Building nations is an old, old craft and the legal instruments used to define have been being written for thousands of years. In many ways our constitution is the Rust of these documents in that it focused on security of structure and by the time it was ratified,…

> individual rights over everything else

I used to admire the US constitution. I've grown up now.

Who could possibly be opposed to human rights - i.e. human beings having rights? And indeed, the US constitution does appear to be largely about rights.

Over the years I've increasingly leaned to the view that these rights are mostly a legal fiction, and that the things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs. Nowadays I think of a constitution as a largely non-political set of rules for how government works; i.e. it's a description of a mechanism, not a description of an outcome.

From that point of view, the US Constitution is an awful constitution.

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