How dare you try and change an amendment
Up until about a hundred years ago we were doing it all the time.
More amendments were ratified in the latter half of 20th century than the entire 19th (6 vs. 4).
Reminds me of this classic Jim Jefferies bit
Because the constitution is the document that lays out the foundation for all of our legal rights and the limitations placed on the government that are intended to keep it accountable to the people. It’s not perfect, but it does cover a hell of a lot, even more gets expanded on through legislation and the courts, and when necessary it can be (and has been) amended.
But it’s also just ink and parchment. It can’t do anything if the government decides to ignore it. It’s the people who give power to the constitution. The more it is valued by the people across the country, throughout the political spectrum, both inside and outside the halls of power, the more likely it will be that those protections are respected. And when those protections are violated, people are far more likely to push back. And many within the government are also more likely to push back. That’s literally the only reason we didn’t have an overturned election, because numerous people at all levels of government said no, many despite being aligned with the assholes that were trying to stay in power.
So yes, I would very much prefer it if everyone would treat the constitution with some reverence if that’s what it takes. The alternative is not pretty.
Maybe.
But we don’t have people storming the capital in an attempt to overthrow elections here (UK) and we don’t have a formal constitution.
The two things might be unrelated.
And we did have some guys trying to storm the Reichstag in Berlin, we do have a constitution, but we don’t call it constitution and it’s also more of a permanent draft.
IMO the constitution is that important to Americans, because they don’t really have tradition or culture to draw from. The USA is a very young country. Yes I know that technically modern day Germany, Italy and others are younger. However, those countries have many centuries of tradition and culture to draw from.
Pretty much every country has some form of ‘the highest law’, which is intentionally kept rather abstract. Afterall it is the framework for more specific laws to fill in and regulate daily life. But an identity and feeling of self for the USA pretty much started with the civil war. Which lead to the writing of the constitution, their ‘highest law’. The constitution is part of the creation mythos for the USA. A marking point of when people start to think of themselves as Americans, a sovereign entity. Since the USA, compared to other countries, doesn’t have much more culture to draw from, the relative importance of that one piece is inevitably higher.
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Given the state of the country thanks to the Tories, maybe you should.
Honestly, it’s been in continual decline my entire life. Thatcher put an end to any sense of social responsibility, New Labour ushered in the era of post-truth politics, Boris and his bunch didn’t even have to pretend that they were acting in the interest of the country.
Anything short of full political reform will only end up being the next phase in this hell spiral.
That is not the issue at all though, you can change the constitution and still hold it in reverence, in fact it would probably be easier to have reverence for it if that was possible.
The problem is that all political constructs does become antiquated over time. It needs to be updated and modernised through amendments or even a rewrite, but the way the US political system is dictated to be makes it virtually impossible to do now. Even mundane legislation cannot be passed any longer, let alone amendments. It is a problem which should have been taken care of long ago, but now it is basically too late for even the slightest attempts at tweaking it.
We do change the Constitution. 26 times so far. There is a process for it, laid out in the Constitution itself. But the process is designed to avoid being used for flavor of the week, and requires a broad consensus.
This comment and this title are two separate things in my opinion. I don’t give a shit what the founding fathers wanted either. That’s why we’ve amended the Constitution several times. The originalist viewpoint of the Constitution is ridiculous and completely counter even to how the founders wanted the document to act, funny enough.
As for why it’s treated like a holy book – it’s basically a set of rules for our government and what laws are okay and which laws aren’t okay. Think of it like a social contract that everyone signed. It’s how we’ve agreed to live together and treat each other. Unlike a holy book though it can and has been changed.
It’s quite literally the legal foundation of the country.
Well the very first and most important thing they wanted was to give you the right to say that or whatever you want about them.
Before they enshrined that concept in their document, saying such things about members of your government would get you jailed or executed.
Sounds like it was useful. Now it seems like it just differentiates us from countries that can do something about the spread of hate.
Not against the Constitution, but the Freedom of Speech **is **perhaps the most anachronistic freedom if you look at much of Europe.
Sounds like it was useful.
It still is? Unless you think someone should be able to go to jail for making a joke about a government official.
Not against the Constitution, but the Freedom of Speech **is **perhaps the most anachronistic freedom if you look at much of Europe.
Yeah you say that when a party you support is in power.
Before getting into line items, let me clarify that I’m talking about the “Freedom of Speech” in capitals, referring to the part of the First Amendment, not to laws that allow people free expression in general.
It still is? Unless you think someone should be able to go to jail for making a joke about a government official.
That’s an unintentionally leading question, in my opinion. In response, let me point you to the majority of Europe where untethered speech is not an inalienable right, and yet it’s still perfectly legal to make jokes about government officials. Yes, there are parts of Europe where you can’t. I’m not fond of lèse-majesté laws, but you don’t need untethered free speech to forbid just that one type of law.
We’d be in a lot better place if this paragraph from the ECHR’s freedom of expression were attached to it:
The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. -cited
Yeah you say that when a party you support is in power.
Bingo. I say that the party in power, even if I somewhat support it, should not be Constitutionally empowered to lie to us from a position of authority. They should not be allowed to use their position to “freely express” things that hurt others. In fact, free expression in speech belongs with all other free expressions. I can throw my hands around unless I’m intentionally throwing them into innocents’ faces.
In most of the world, free expression means when I know I’m not lying, and when I’m not being grossly negligent or antisocial in my speech. I’m sorry, but I approve of the censoring of Naziism or any organized expression that seeks to eradicate or punish any ethnicity. I would support a law that forbids people from what the South did after our Civil War, targeted lies that have led to over a century of the country “expressing” the supposed inferiority of non-white people.
Can we please not turn microblog memes into the new whitepeopletwitter where we just post unnuanced political opinions rather than funny memes? Microblogs are a bad platform for political discourse.
That’s a valid point, got it.
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The framework as described in the constitutional has led to full and complete political gridlock
Honestly one of the best parts about it. Everything both parties can agree on doing federally lately is awful. The things they want to do but can’t because of the constitution are worse.
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That seems dangerously optimistic to me though. If what should be done is not what elected officials will do, and what they will do is what should not be done, then isn’t removing the barriers constraining them from acting just going to make things much worse? Even if you can get a government in office sometimes that is not malevolent, it would still be a net negative.
For it to be worth it, you would have to either have a realistic path to consistently electing people that serve the will of an informed and thoughtful population, or the circumstances are so dire and the need to make positive changes so desperate that things can’t actually get much worse than a course of inaction so you might as well risk it. To me it doesn’t seem like either are the case yet; there is no clear path to that, and things could be much, much worse.
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Every other industrialized democracy is able to do this
I’m not convinced of this, especially with Europe flirting with stuff like encryption bans and far right extremism, other countries could benefit from more restrictive constitutions.
A government that doesn’t pass legislation isn’t the safety net you think, it is the precursor to authoritarian control and dictatorship
Can you give a specific example of this happening or rationale why it would happen?
If you live in [constitutional gridlock] then you should be arming yourself to the teeth right now and storming the government.
For what should be very obvious reasons this would be a disaster. This is the sort of mindset driving the events of Jan 6 and I hope those sorts of people with no respect for our republic fail.
This. The government in the US is thought of as a thing that exists over there. Like a king in his castle. But we call it a democracy. And in a democracy, governance is just the rules that we set up to keep our communities operating in a sustainable way that provides the community members with the highest quality of life. So the government, is really just us following our own rules.
Rules that are well designed have a defined scope, and address known caveats and risks. Good governance rules come with qualitative and quantitative monitoring built into them, as well as periodic evaluation. The evaluation should identify whether the rule is still providing the intended service to society, how well it is doing so, and how to improve it based on lessons learned and ever-evolving social context. Then the rule is iteratively improved so that the intended outcomes, both statistically and culturally, are improved, based on evidence and feedback.
The rules themselves would be governed by a set of agreed-upon principles that reflect the culture and aspirations of a people, usually in the form of a constitution or charter. These principles, likewise, would be subject to periodic review for improvement or retiring to history.
My point is that the world changes, society changes, culture changes, the environment changes, people change and so too should the principles and rules which we design to make our lives better, also change.
The longer the gap between their last update and the present moment, the worse of a job they do in addressing the needs of the present moment.
The Forefathers didn’t come close to living up to their own words. We are still striving to meet them hundreds of years later. It’s a good goal.
Equally however a lot of that stipulations make no sense.
For example the gun laws were developed back when firing a shot required about a 45-minute reload session. I somehow doubt that automatic rifles were predicted and considered.
I highly suspect they thought that the American people would be intelligent enough to make their own constitution when the current one became invalid, sadly not.
ust as the founding fathers intended
Own a musket for home defense, since that’s what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. “What the devil?” As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he’s dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it’s smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, “Tally ho lads” the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion.He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up, Just as the founding fathers intended
Not to say that the 2nd amendment, as written, isn’t totally wild.
However I do want to mention that the Continental congress was petitioned by John Belton in 1777 to purchase his 16-shot musket. It also had a not-quite-magazine that could be replaced very quickly. The 16 shots could be fired as quickly as the user could pull the triggers (yes it had multiple).
Given this, it seems likely that the people writing the constitution ten years later had some idea of rapid fire weaponry.
Just 20 years after that, they sent Lewis and Clarke expedition out with a relatively rapid firing airgun.
It is reasonable to say that rapid fire weaponry was contemporaneous to the constitution writing era.
I was going to essentially say this same thing so I’ll just add there was also the Chambers ‘machine gun’ a flintlock naval gun able of firing 224 shots @ ~120 rounds per minute.
The technology we associate with periods of time isn’t reflective of the peak of technology but more often the median. In the last army rifle trials a company was trying to get a rifle with caseless ammunition in service. That technology has been around since the 1850s and still hasn’t been adopted by anyone despite it’s obvious advantages.
They were also written with the idea that the US wouldn’t have a standing army, but would instead rely on volunteers. You need to have your volunteers armed and at least somewhat proficient with a firearm.
Of course that’s also how you get the war of 1812 lol.
Because many of those men were flat-out geniuses. They penned a fine constitution and outlined ideals we should strive to achieve. That doesn’t mean they knew the best way to legislate modern issues though , like the internet. That brings us back to their genius. They outlined a process to revise, or amend if you will, the laws of the land. The biggest problem that they didn’t foresee is that America would regress into fervent tribalism, completely unwilling to amend anything that might benefit another tribe. So we’re stuck, locked in the year 1992 when the last amendment was written. Actually that’s not completely true. Many of them did foresee the dangers of a bicameral partisan system, and issued abundant warnings about it. Unfortunately they really didn’t anticipate just how insulated and shameless many of our politicians would become, probably because tar and feathers in the public square was still a possibility back then.
Thing is, yesterday’s geniuses are today’s average person, average intelligence is going up and there’s tons more people on the planet today vs back then, that’s a whole lot of geniuses that could create a much better constitution but that are unable to because some people at the other end of the spectrum act like some dude 250 years ago could predict the world we would live in today (when they in fact predicted that the Constitution would need to be amended in the future).
Yeah you said it yourself, the constitution is meant to be amended. We haven’t seen a new amendment in 31 years because our politicians are thoroughly dedicated to blocking each other.
That’s not a problem with the constitution, though. That’s a problem with the backstabbing nature of politics/culture wars in the USA.
The idea is supposed to be that we only update the structure of our government as needed when there’s broad support for it. That should be easy when we’re considering a change that’s obviously in the public interest.
But right now, if someone from the “wrong” party says that the sky is blue, the other party will come up with all sorts of reasons why They Are Wrong And Evil. You can’t cooperate when the only rule is to badmouth the other guy.
Exactly.
average intelligence is going up
Not anymore. Average intelligence in Western countries plateaud and started dropping around 10 years ago.
That’s still how many years of it going up since the US founding fathers?
Take the founding fathers and send them to today’s world and they’ll end up homeless.wrong comment chainMy point still stands.
Only because they lack knowledge, not because they lack intelligence. They were extremely intelligent men.
Oh sorry, that seconds part (added as an edit) should have went in my reply to the other comment that mentioned sending someone from today back in time to the days of the founding fathers!
Nope, the political leaders that founded the USA were extremely well educated and would probably put the average modern person to shame on any topic or skill that wasn’t invented after their death. Motherfuckers these days can barely read and write.
The average dumbass knows how to Google stuff now, and feels like they are smart because they can operate a touch screen device and access information.
But if you take that same “smart” average modern dumbass back to colonial USA times and they would not know how to survive at all. They would be like “where’s my cheeseburger? Where’s my shower?” and just fucking die of bacterial infection from stubbing their toe probably. Those old dudes were building their own houses, farming their own food, writing long political essays and shit. They were out there inventing all the stuff we take for granted now.
And today there’s more and more very well educated people around. Heck, compare the number of women that had access to university back then vs today.
Take the founding fathers and send them to today’s world and they’ll end up homeless.
My point is that they might have been very smart and educated back then, people like them exist today and there’s much more of them, we just don’t listen to them.
In any governing system, something has to be supreme. Something has to be the final word in settling disputes. There are basically three options: Fiat, convention, or consensus. Consensus is really only practical in small groups, so we can put that option to the side. What remains is the choice between rule by the whims of a person or group, and the rule of law.
Despite their many flaws, the founders of the American republic were at least smart enough to realize that there would be a constant temptation to set aside the rule of law and let a person dictate things. So the foundational law (the constitution) was made sacrosanct in the way that the king had been. To lose the rule of law is to lose the republic, and return to tyranny.
Consensus is really only practical in small groups
Not at all, that’s the whole point of a republic, it’s consensus based.
I suppose I should have said “unanimity” rather than “consensus”. But I already wrote it down, so now it can never be amended.
The irony that you can edit your comment does not go unnoticed.
Made me chuckle
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I like the constitution because I don’t want Matt Gaetz to be able to propose whatever nonsense he wants. It’s not a perfect document, but it enshrines certain fundamental protections that really shouldn’t be fucked with.
The constitution is the foundation of the entire US legal system. Without it the whole thing collapses.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean it is infallible.
I mean we wouldnt need governments and legal systems if anything was infallible.
There is so much nuance to it, and it outlines a good system. However it is based on assumptions about the integrity, awareness, and independence of thought each citizen would have that have been systematically undermined.
Even the best written laws are not immune to misinterpretation, seems to be a big problem.
True as that may be, the sanctity it is held to is immensely harmful, as it kills any chance of improvement and progress.
It has barely anything in it. How exactly is it killing any chance of improvement and progress? The only really harmful thing I can think of in the constitution is the electoral college. I think most of the problems with it are just because of how much room it leaves for interpretation.
Another big constitutional issue is the influence of money in Federal elections. It is a logical outgrowth of the first amendment, but causes a ton of problems. Citizens United was rightly decided, it’s just that the outcome sucks.
I used to ask people:
If you could write a constitutional amendment of 15 words or less, what would it say?
It seems more like just another thing the constitution overlooked, by being too vague.
Only narrow minded people do. The rest of us understand as our forefathers did, that the constitution is a framework, that is malleable. It is meant to be updated over time and fine tuned. That is why they left the ability to add amendments.
Because according to our education system, we’re the only country that has a constitution, and we used it to beat the greatest evil: taxing rich people.
WITHOUT REPRESENTATION
Where is this narrative of intentionally forgetting that the grievance was specifically over having no say in the fucking matter despite being the ones who actually have to live with the decisions coming from‽ Westminster‽
This narrative is like calling the Haitian revolution an uprising against having to respect property rights!
Either the constitution has the ultimate authority in government, or our presidents do. And have you see the kind of people we elect president?
There are other forms of authority, even in the US.
I don’t think OP is talking about the existence of the constitution, but rather it’s about how Americans cite it like it’s the Bible.
For example, instead of saying the plain-and-simple “I have free rights to express my opinion” I have seen people saying “The X amendment guarantees freedom of speech” or something like that instead.
It’s kinda weird.
There are three foundations an argument takes:
-Pathos - Emotion, e.g. “I believe in this argument!”
-Logos - Logic, e.g. “This is the logic behind this argument.”
-and Ethos - Authority, e.g. “This is the authority that backs this argument.”
Everyone in American politics has emotion behind their arguments and no one cares for logic. So if you say: “I have free rights to express my opinion,” or really any other argument, an American will counter with: “Who says that? That isn’t a universal given.”
it’s about how Americans cite it like it’s the Bible.
It is.
Our laws aren’t really organized like European countries. Every single law we have can be traced back to the Constitution. All legal authority for all government derives from it. That is literally how our legal system is designed. We don’t have to use some vague “I have rights” thing, we can go straight to the source.
No one can argue with the Constitution. If we amend the Constitution to say we must all carry rubber duckies on Tuesdays, then everyone will carry a rubber duckie on Tuesdays. It is the supreme law of the land. If the constitution says something and you don’t like it, you have to convince the population to amend it.
This is a pretty ignorant take. We can change the rules whenever we want. This is the whole process of amendments.
I would be mildly surprised if there’s every another amendment again, very surprised if there’s one in our lifetime.
Nah, i would 100% believe term limits for supreme court eventually or maybe even repeal/revise of the 16th amendment… amendment to limit tax dollars used on foreign engagements… amendment to make funding to congress transparent… amendment to put limits on predatory loans… amendment to officially not allow sitting presidents to run businesses…
Idunno feels like theres still some bipartisan opportunities
We can change the rules whenever we want.
Can we? The Equal Rights Amendment was supported by a majority of Americans but it never passed.
Hmmm, it’s been a while since ive read about read about that one, but wasnt there contraversy on the wording of that? Like it could adversely affect womens rights if that were passed or that it is the same protections under the 14th… but last time I checked something like 3/4 of all the states have already ratified the ERA in the states side. It is a weird one
The opposition of the ERA was almost entirely from the right and focused on scaremongering about the end of traditional gender roles.
Dont get me wrong, i know the opposition was coming from the right but im just saying what I remember the reasoning was. Places like New York and Oregon have codified it into their own state constitutions where as Oklahoma and Alabama havent.
I know it took many years to allow same sex marriage but it fell under the 14th. I would like to think that these sorts of rights are only bound to be given within my lifetime.
If only they supported it enough to actually show up at the elections that would have affected the chance of the amendment passing.
I think the take has more to do with the rather depressing amount of originalists stocking the courts of American Constitutional law. Like Justice’s Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Barrett. Originalism in Constitutional law practice draws it’s primary guiding light from the idea that Constitutional law should be adjudicated based on what the perspective of what the authors of the founding documents intentions were. Often this leads to extremely anachronistic takes on the document rather than a concern for the people whom it effects because it treats the country as though the greatest authority is to fictionalized versions of it’s authors rather than the needs of it’s living citizenry.
The constitution itself is an important document… but it is less important than the principles that guide how it is actively utilized by living justices.
That’s exactly the problem, it is impossible to change it now. The system itself prevents any more changes because it has become so archaic and corrupt.
