The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

> There's a sort of obvious framing to the piece that the Constitution should be more fluid and easy to amend. I think 2022 is a very weird time to prioritize that. I'm not a doomer about US politics, but they're not in a very good state right now. 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.

The article is just a whine-fest about how "we could ban things I don't like and make law things I do!" Just from the perspective of a historian which doesnt mean they're immune to someones extreme biases.

> It's about how the modern Constitution has become "un-amendable", but it spends a big chunk of the middle of the piece demonstrating the Constitution was never really all that amendable: successful amendments are extraordinarily rare, especially when they're about big-ticket issues. Our biggest structural changes occurred after an enormous civil war.

Indeed, the greatest success of America is the unamenability of the constitution. Yes, in edge cases like slavery you would wish something could be done. However, nothing in said constitution explicitly permit slavery. Interpreted in the most charitable way slavery should've been unconstitutional from the get-go. At any rate, the constitution is about as close as we can come to a "ground truth". Other countries have constitutions that are more amenable. As a result, there's political chaos all the time as every politician does their own thing and undoes other things. Since these are ground truths all other laws can be forged from them. It appears this historian needs to go back to US Government 101. Nothing in the constitution explicitly forbids abortion, immigration, etc. In fact, the constitution should take no position on these issues. They are not "ground truth" rights that we are given for simply existing. If you head down that path, then suddenly we are codifying what will end up looking like the 10 commandments instead of a book of rights. The constitution is not a moral guide. It's a series of meta-laws from which all others can (should) be derived.

> 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?

What good reason is there to believe a politician today could do better? Or are you simply trying to use slavery as a cudgel to get people to not argue with you? Politicians today are a ruling class that are worth hundreds times more than the average citizen, receive better benefits like healthcare, can use privileged information for financial gain, are often large land owners, etc. Nothing has changed - at all. If anything, it's probably gotten worse at scale.

> 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.

Political interpretation by the lunatics in a post-mcarthy world are the reason that people think the bill of rights should be flexible. "But the founding fathers never talked about the internet!" is a very pathetic excuse from a very pathetic ruling class that currently controls this country. Any violation of the freedom of speech no matter the medium is a deprivation of rights. We have chosen to interpret it differently. Once you start opening this can of worms up you get all sorts of problems with what is intentionality, what is association, does "free speech" include things I don't like, etc. Right now there are plenty of politicians on every side of the spectrum who'd love to ban everything they don't like.

What I guess I am saying is people are the problem. Greedy, slimy, humans. The world is no more complex at it's core than it was 200 odd years ago. We have made it complicated by spending time finding gotchas instead of treating the constitution as a series of unquestionable meta-laws. Fix the politicians. The document is fine. To use your analogy, allowing simple amendments would be like changing the entire PR review process because a handful of malicious engineers refuse to ever follow the rules. Just fire the engineers!

And e.g. eastern Germany build the Berlin wall to hold back the masses of western Germans that also wanted to be lifted out of poverty? /sarcasm off

Or was it the other way around?

For a long time now I have tried to sum up the differences between the US and Canada in our founding principals. Canada's is "Peace, Order, and Good Government". Contrast that against the "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" and the fundamental differences in our approaches to government make a lot more sense.

We're much more like the UK than the US in the function of government and the construction of laws, though Parliamentary Sovereignty is expressly subject to judicial review in Canada, something the UK is going to have to grapple with over the next decade now that they are no longer subject to the European Court of Human Rights.

The government can't just override the charter as they please using the language in the Guarantee. The charter allows for things like hate speech laws, but they have to fall under "reasonable limits", something the Supreme Court of Canada rules on all the time, nearly always in favour of citizens compared to the government. A recent example being medically assist death, where the Supreme Court ruled bans on assisted death violated the Charter.

The US is a free speech extremist country, but since even the US Supreme Court has ruled there are limits on speech (like threats) this isn't a night and day difference between our countries in my view. The US allows far more speech than Canada does, yet we rank higher on the press freedom index.

The thing that really lets the Charter down is section 33, the 'notwithstanding clause'. It allows the federal and provincial governments to pass laws overriding certain rights for a period of 5 years. The charter itself would likely never have come into being without it, but it does take some of the teeth away.

Well, this is an international forum, so I think it's a good idea to remember that many people reading are not from the same country and may have different interpretations of some terms. Also, maybe looking outside and gathering new data once in a while may put the problems you percieve your country to have in broader context, and help you find new solutions that actually work.