IIRC, the first constitution placed more power in the hands of the Demos, which would have allowed more modifications. The framers scrapped it and churned out a second constitution with more limited powers for the people, partly to make it harder to amend.
The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
561–570 of 747 posts
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#562Earlier 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…
> 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 version 5 or 6 now
The mistake here is thinking that "political science" is actually a science, and so being on "version 5 or 6" is actually some kind of objective marker of progress in knowledge. That's a dubious assertion at best.
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…
Why is it odd that in a federalized country 1 person is not necessarily 1 vote? Look at the UN general assembly: votes of island nations with few thousand people are worth the same as another nation with 1B people.
If you ignore the security council, where a small number of powerful nations rule over everyone else.
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#564Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#565It'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…
Personally I think the constitution should contain only the very basic meta law. What is a law, what do we mean with rights, that the country is divided into states, what congress is etc.. In a language for this forum, something like a lisp kernel or a set of axioms. Abortion, gun rights, and so on are actual legal content and should be strictly separate laws. From the perspective of a software engineer, many legal bodies seem poorly organized (especially in countries with Anglo-Saxon heritage).
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
The SCOTUS is "independent" in the sense that it does not have any person or institution they have to answer to, but I'm not sure if that's really all that relevant. The individual members have vastly different views on how to interpret the law, and are clearly put in place for political reasons. And courts should be "swayed by public sentiment". A judge's job is "to judge", and general societal attitudes play part o…
> And courts should be "swayed by public sentiment". That's problematic. Part of the function of courts and judges is to convince people not to "take the law into their own hands", and mete-out punishment by mob. That incentivizes courts to hand-down more severe sentences, especially in scandalous cases. Another part is to interpret the law fairly (Justice as Fairness), a function that is often at odds with the forme…
Well, you turned "general societal attitudes" in to "appease the mob", which is a very different thing.
In 1986 the SCOTUS rules that consensual homosexual sex in private could be banned (Bowers v. Hardwick). Such a ruling would be almost unthinkable today, and was already overturned in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas). All the arguments used in 1986 and 2003 could still be used today because the constitution hasn't changed, but what is and isn't societally acceptable on this front very much has.
I'm not talking about whatever was in the papers this week, or the opinion polls this year, or whatever Biden or Trump or whomever said last week, I'm talking about broad and general shifts in attitudes that take place over years and decades.
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 capi…
I thought the USSR went through famines because of the natural conditions, (drought and unusual coldness).
Didn't the Ukrainian famines happened because the URSS was also exporting grain at the same time to capitalist countries, in exchange for industrial development?
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 1st Amendment has always been widely hated, going back nearly to the very first year, ateast as far back as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
>”The 1st Amendment has always been widely hated, going back nearly to the very first year” This is the first time I’ve heard that the First Amendment was hated, much less widely hated, and that it has been so widely hated since the founding of the country. What are you basing this off of?
Everyone hates it when speech they don't like is permitted. Politicians hate parodies and getting lampooned by comedians and journalists. Christians hate it when "satanists" mock their religion. And on and on.
Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Your entire argument falls under when you take into consideration that the very judicial power that's "vested" to the Supreme Court in its jurisdiction is solely delegated to Judges that Congress appoints. 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 effe…
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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
#570It'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…
Meanwhile, Ireland manages to amend its constitution regularly [1] without exploding.
I _very much disagree_ with the assertion that the US constitution's rigidity is its greatest strength. Similar to taking on too much technical debt, this rigidity makes it impossible to update in response to changing circumstances! I'm not convinced that's ever a good thing; what good reason is there to believe that a constitution conceived over 200 years ago (when the US had roughly 1% the people, ~1/3 the land, legal slavery, an early-industrial / agrarian economy, etc., etc., etc.) is useful today?
Even if we agree that "free speech" and "free association" are reasonable universal rights (and I think we do), what these concepts mean in practice must necessarily evolve as technology gives us new ways of speaking and associating - and we will _always_ have to deal with the difficult question of what to do when someone, through exercising these rights, deprives others (intentionally or unintentionally) of the ability to exercise theirs. This balance necessarily changes as our methods of exercising free speech and association change.
Overall, I'd argue that this rigidity - in the constitution, in the calcified two-party system, in US politics / political systems in general - maybe started out as a unique strength, but is _very much_ a weakness in more complex and rapidly changing times.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendments_to_the_Constitution...