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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#621

Post by dylan604 »

_-david-_ wrote: post #613
HaZeust wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas v. White was a lot more complex than that; Specifically, the court claimed that the Constitution, in its effort to "form a more perfect union," precluded secession. Secession was inherently unconstitutional, because its foundations are that the "more perfect" union is imperfect and not salvageable by any action - short of divorce. Supreme Court Justice Salmon P. Chase in 1869, Chief Justice at the time: "When,…

I understand what the Supreme Court said. There are a few problems with it though. 1. The founders wholly rejected that notion. The Declaration of Independence says >When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of…

>2. If a state cannot leave, then how did the Southern States become military districts? Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the right to strip states of statehood?

This was a key point that the 90s Republic of Texas movement keyed on, and they would tell anyone within earshot about why all Texas flags in courts are trimmed in gold fringe.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#622

Post by _-david-_ »

joshuamorton wrote: post #430
_-david-_ wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't making an argument against the point you were trying to convey, but the argument you were using. It is not Wyoming and Idaho's fault, but an erroneous understanding of the 14th amendment that caused California to lose the right to ban guns. If the incorporation of the bill of Rights never happened California could ban not just handguns but every gun they wanted. I agree that Wyoming, Idaho and like minded st…

I mean I think that incorporation has a clearer constitutional basis than heller, but I see your point. It also doesn't help that the constitution is unpleasantly vague in many places. It is a legal document, the chief legal document in fact, and yet we are forced to define legality based not so much on the text but on the vibe of the text (and yes this is true even if you are a textualist!), because the text isn't p…

>I mean I think that incorporation has a clearer constitutional basis than heller, but I see your point

I hold the opposite view as you can probably tell.

>It also doesn't help that the constitution is unpleasantly vague in many places.

I think the problem is people have a misconstrued understanding of the role of the federal government based on erroneous court decisions.

We are now in a situation where people think the federal government can do anything except what is banned in the Constitution. This is one of the reasons why some of the founders were opposed to the Bill of Rights. They knew this exact situation would happen. Instead of thinking the government is allowed to do what is granted to them (enumerated powers) people now think the government can do anything that is not banned.

The federal government is allowed to do 27 things and nothing more. The courts have consistently allowed the government to do more and more and interpreted things exactly opposite of what it says (Wickard v Filburn for example).

Another issue is some people look at other countries and assume the US federal government should be able to act in the same way. We see this all the time. We have people saying the US is the only developed country without X. The problem is X isn't supposed to be done by the federal government, you have to look at what the States do.

Sorry about rambling. Not sure if I fully responded to you.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#623

Post by dragonwriter »

candiddevmike wrote: post #538
WalterBright wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BoR has been under continuous and relentless assault for well over two centuries. It is battered and bloodied, but has held up surprisingly well.

The recent abortion ruling disagrees with you. Same with the Patriot Act.

> The recent abortion ruling disagrees with you.

While it is in many ways the main provision that gives meaningful impact to rights both in and beyond the BOR (though the 13th Amendment competes with it on that front, since if people can be treated as property instead of people, they have no rights) by applying them to the main locus of government authority, the states, which the BOR itself neglected to do, the 14th Amendment, which was at issue in Dobbs, is not part of the Bill of Rights.

So Dobbs doesn’t illustrate an assault on the Bill of Rights so much as its irrelevancy in the absence of subsequent amendments.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#624

Post by [deleted] »

dylan604 wrote: post #621
_-david-_ wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what the Supreme Court said. There are a few problems with it though. 1. The founders wholly rejected that notion. The Declaration of Independence says >When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of…

>2. If a state cannot leave, then how did the Southern States become military districts? Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the right to strip states of statehood? This was a key point that the 90s Republic of Texas movement keyed on, and they would tell anyone within earshot about why all Texas flags in courts are trimmed in gold fringe.

[deleted]

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#625

Post by justin66 »

johnthuss wrote: post #65
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

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.

> Clearly Republicans have benefited greatly from the electoral college lately. Whether that is good or bad depends on your political leaning.

It actually is possible to have an opinion about the electoral college that is grounded in principal, rather than how your favored political party is benefiting.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#626

Post by indymike »

denton-scratch wrote: post #530
indymike wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

> s I've increasingly leaned to the view that these rights are mostly a legal fiction

Ultimately all constitutions are just ink on paper (or parchment depending on age) and are only as good as the people who govern.

> things that are supposedly rights are highly subjective political footballs.

The fabric of society is a pitch where political football is played. The US Constitution is a product of the times when it was created, and so our pitch was created to balance the power of populous states vs. rural states with proportional representation (House) and fixed representation (Senate) and the electoral college. It took great pains to prevent rule by fiat of the executive because of the lesson from English rule. It's surprising it has held up, but a lot of the pressures that existed when it was created are still present (red state/blue state is really urban/rural) in the US today.

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

If a slow, plodding government that is largely effective only when faced with unifying crisis or there is a very high level of consensus is what you want, then the US Constitution works.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#627

Post by funcDropShadow »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #374
ETH_start wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real world data is extremely limited, given there are only ~200 countries in the modern era, and the huge span of time over which the full impact of a constitution is seen. It's incomparable to PLs, which have perhaps billions of case studies on which comparative analysis can be done.

Remind me how many PL's there are again.

Not GP here. I would estimate the number of programming languages is in the thousands, but the number of languages with multiple implementations and long-term maintained programs written in it is probably below one hundred. All the others do not contribute a meaningful body of real-world data for the purpose to learn from programming language design. But they might have contributed knowledge of about the design space of programming languages.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#628

Post by pythonaut_16 »

jquery wrote: post #243
ern wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No less a jurist than Antonin Scalia (one of the most conservative and intellectually formidable Supreme Court justices, whatever your opinion of his positions) thought that the US Constitution was too hard to amend: "Scalia said fewer than 2 percent of the population could prevent enactment of a constitutional amendment. “It ought to be hard, but not that hard" https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how_scalia_and_…

Yeah. I agree that amending should be hard, it shouldn’t be subject to a simple 50%+1 vote count. But a supermajority should be enough. What we have is ridiculous. A supermajority of support is nowhere near enough to pass an amendment. It’s leading to the Supreme Court accruing more and more power in what’s becoming an unaccountable superlegislature. Ironically de facto giving the power to amend the Constitution to a…

Consider that no amendments are currently being held up by a small minority. Congress simply isn't proposing amendments. And most likely amendments on current issues would fail to get even a simple majority of states to ratify.

The hard truth is that most amendments that get discussed today are around issues with no level of national consensus.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#629

Post by _-david-_ »

int_19h wrote: post #462
floxy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's possible for the small states representing less than 25% of the overall population to band together and ratify any constitutional amendment I took the 2020 Census population figures from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ... ...and came up with the 38 smallest states (75% of 50) had a total population of 134 million or 40.5% of the U.S. population; the largest 12 states had a combined…

I'm accounting for indirection via state legislatures, since it's the latter who ratify by simple majority - so the MPs in the state legislature who vote to ratify don't necessarily represent all the residents of that state (in fact, given the quirks of FPTP and tricks like gerrymandering, things can be ratified against popular majority in the state).

All residents of the state are represented by their representatives even if they don't support and didn't vote for the representative.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#630

Post by funcDropShadow »

tomp wrote: post #534
kelseyfrog wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parliamentary systems are generally considered more stable than presidential systems and tend to more naturally express multiparty politics (Australia and UK not withstanding). Even while many people in the US might like the things a parliamentary system has to offer, there is no viable way to transition to one culturally. As much Americans hate how politics works presently, they hate the idea of replacing it even mo…

> Parliamentary systems are generally considered more stable Hm... Germany's system changed at least 3 times in the 20th century. France is on its Fifth Republic. Italy is a shitshow. To me it seems that the oldest democracies (UK, US) are the most stable (even today!) and they're majority systems (first-past-the-post).

Replacing a prime minister after 6 weeks is an extremely short term, even for Italy. The current German constitution --- basic law to be precise -- has lasted twice as long as the previous German constitution. And its end doesn't appear on the horizon. The stability of the US system looked quite dire from the outside less than two years ago.
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