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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#61

Post by BitwiseFool »

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…

>"Lepore talks about national abortion, immigration, and firearms policy and how they'd be impacted by a more readily-amended Constitution, but I think she should take a wider view and look at things like how speech and free association would be impacted."

I feel like the author is looking at using amendments as a way to implement legislation that is permanent. Our Federal constitution is fairly concise, whereas some State constitutions are so easy and readily amendable that legislation gets codified in almost every session [1]. The challenge with doing this is that the constitution itself converges into just another body of law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Alabama

Edit: Instead of "permanent", "decisively" would be more appropriate. A constitution that can easily be amended can just as easily be un-amended. A response to this comment said "way to settle national controversies" which seems far more fitting than what I originally wrote.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#62

Post by dbrueck »

I like the idea of the Constitution as a living document, updated over time, but I'm also really glad it's so hard to amend. It's not perfect, but there are usually extremely good reasons for pretty much everything in there, and so if we're going to change something, it seems like a prerequisite should be a deep understanding of why something was put in there in the first place.

Take the Electoral College. It's en vogue right now to talk about abolishing it (it's also popular to talk about it as if it's sacred, and in both cases, it seems a lot of people's feelings about it are based on whether or not their favorite candidate won a recent election, but I digress). If people want to change or even remove it, that's fine, but they should first have a very deep understanding of why it is how it is - an understanding that's a bit deeper than they got in their high school U.S. Government class.

If you go back and read the Federalist papers, for example, you can't help but come away with a profound admiration for how much thought people put into these things, even if you don't agree with their conclusions. There's just a ton of wisdom and thought there. If you can come up with something better, great, but among other things you really should have to articulate their original reasoning and make a good case for how their concerns aren't relevant now, or that your idea is a better set of tradeoffs, etc. Just saying that the EC isn't fair falls way short of that - yeah, they thought about stuff like that, a lot.

Another reason why it's good to have a hard-to-modify Constitution right now is because we are currently pretty terrible at negotiating politically and building any sort of consensus - the hard work of bridge building is often skipped, and so more legislation is passing with the slimmest of majorities, and each presidency seems to do more via executive action. (And to whoever is tempted to respond with, "yes, the X party is terrible at this" needs to take a closer look at their preferred party, because both of the 2 major parties are terrible at it, just often in different ways. But they are both corrupt and broken to the core, at least on the national level) If we can't pull back from this and get to a more sane working and collaboration environment, the "unamenadability" of the Constitution might be the thing that saves us (or, maybe, the thing that delays our drive off the cliff by a few years at least).

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#63

Post by prottog »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
johnthuss wrote: post #15

"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…

> 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…

The cap on the size of the House should be lifted, so that an approximately equal number of people are represented by each representative, no matter what state you live in. I don't see the problem in both California and Wyoming getting two senators, since that's (as you mention) precisely the point of the Senate.

It's very deliberately built in to the American political system that the will of the half-plus-one majority does not dictate the direction of the whole country. If anything, the ever-increasing Federalization of laws and policies is the real problem: Californians living like Californians is fine, and Wyomingites living like Wyomingites is also fine, but there is a problem when one tries to make the other live more like them.

Let's have fifty vibrant laboratories of democracy.

> how many presidential elections we can go where the "winner" receives fewer votes than the "loser" before people seriously question what the purpose of our democracy is.

I'm already questioning that myself, considering roughly half of all eligible voters don't even bother to show up for presidential elections -- let alone midterms, which is more like two thirds. If we consider that chunk that does not vote as being OK with the status quo, then I think we have a lot of room left before American democracy is really imperiled.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#64

Post by tptacek »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #61
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…

>"Lepore talks about national abortion, immigration, and firearms policy and how they'd be impacted by a more readily-amended Constitution, but I think she should take a wider view and look at things like how speech and free association would be impacted." I feel like the author is looking at using amendments as a way to implement legislation that is permanent. Our Federal constitution is fairly concise, whereas some…

It's another way in which the article doesn't cohere, because it seems clear that Lepore sees amendments as in part a way to settle national controversies (like birthright citizenship or the right to bear arms). But an amendable Constitution doesn't settle anything, as you point out.

What it really does is sap political power from the Supreme Court, which is a reasonable goal for someone like Lepore to have right now.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#65

Post by johnthuss »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
johnthuss wrote: post #15

"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…

> 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…

Clearly Republicans have benefited greatly from the electoral college lately. Whether that is good or bad depends on your political leaning. As a centrist I appreciate that the USA California. I don’t know that it is possible to judge this issue in an unbiased way.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#66

Post by prottog »

nonethewiser wrote: post #51

Controversial policy cannot and should not become amendments. There is very little that everyone agrees that the government should do and the government is already very powerful. That's why constitutional amendments are so rare.

Absolutely! The constitution by its nature should dictate things that the overwhelming majority of people agree on, not the usual fifty percent plus one person slim margin that a lot of controversial policies end up being.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#67

Post by jakeogh »

wincy wrote: post #59
jakeogh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new user commented: excite1997 0 minutes ago | unvote | parent | next [–] This thread is likely gonna be a minefield and get canned, but the article takes a swing at the 2nd Amendment, for example, pretending to be impartial but calling it a "reinterpretation". I was surprised to see it go dead almost instantly. It's a fair comment (well, the minefield part is unnecessary). I wanted to reply with: Listening to the…

Weird. I have showdead on but was this actually deleted? I see no such comment, but see the other dead comment where someone said a poem or something in another thread.

Yea, all I can think of is that it was deleted, I think a user can do that. I wish I had screenshotted what happened when I hit reply, I thought I saw [dead], but idk.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#68

Post by prottog »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #60

I consider myself a patriotic American, but I don't know that the government even follows the Constitution in the first place. NSA has been hoovering up data of innocent Americans, and the IC in general, works with foreign ICs, to target Americans without reasonable cause, just blanket vacuuming. Much of the govt, including federal, state, and local, has been purchasing private data without a warrant signed by a judg…

Indeed, why bother amending something that isn't being adhered to in the first place.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#69

Post by hotpotamus »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #60

I consider myself a patriotic American, but I don't know that the government even follows the Constitution in the first place. NSA has been hoovering up data of innocent Americans, and the IC in general, works with foreign ICs, to target Americans without reasonable cause, just blanket vacuuming. Much of the govt, including federal, state, and local, has been purchasing private data without a warrant signed by a judg…

> The problem we have is, the US Constitution isn't being followed in the first place.

I hear this pretty frequently and often and I wonder, perhaps the constitution is inadequate to the task of governing the US in the 21st century? It seems like no one can agree on what it means - I'm told that we need highly educated legal scholars to properly interpret it before the Supreme Court, but there seems to be less consensus on it than there was in previous centuries.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#70

Post by dragonwriter »

nonethewiser wrote: post #51

Controversial policy cannot and should not become amendments. There is very little that everyone agrees that the government should do and the government is already very powerful. That's why constitutional amendments are so rare.

> Controversial policy cannot and should not become amendments.

The problem with making the Constitution hard to amend as the means of preventing that is that it stops new constitutional provisions that are controversial from being added, but it doesn’t prevent old constitutional provisions that are controversial among the people currently governed by them from remaining. This is why Jefferson thought that laws, including constitutions, needed to automatically sunset to prevent the living being ruled from beyond the grave by the dead.

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