At this point, is the difficulty in amending the Constitution actually a bug? Seeing the polarization, I could see our Founding Fathers deciding that's actually a feature right now because it prevents one side from getting the upper hand and telling the rest to stuff it.
It is a feature. The Constitution defines a series of feedback loops with different time-constants:
House: 2 yr
President: 4 yr
Senate: 6 yr
President-term-limit: 8 yr
Supreme-Court justice: ~16 years (per Google for average term)
Constitutional Amendment: Hard. ~13.5 years between updates, potentially infinite duration. (231 years since Bill of Rights was added, 17 amendments since then)
Each of these allows for differing response-times to a changing world. If you're a control-theory engineer, you might view Congress and the President as a PID loop, where the President is P, the House is D, and the Senate is I.
The goal of the Constitution is to ascertain what the people want, in aggregate. This series of cascaded loops helps to serve that purpose.
I mostly agree. At this point though, each side tries to circumvent it anyways by at least stretching "interpretations", and the courts tend to allow it.
I'd rather have that than have the constitution easier to amend. Otherwise the whipping back-and-forth on constitutional issues as each party takes power would be extremely destabilizing and legally chaotic. It already is; don't make it worse.
I don't see how the abuses in the current system make it less chaotic. Regardless of whether I like or hate the specifics of a topic where a legally dubious mechanism was used to accomplish it, I hate the concept that both parties abuse and mis-use the governmental mechanisms to accomplish what they want.
That said, I do feel like we have hugely eroded its protections. It's not worth quite as much when it's just blatantly ignored (Andrew Jackson) or absurdly interpreted (civil asset forfeiture[0]).
It absolutely is a feature. The government already has tons of power and there are few policies that everyone agrees on. No wonder we dont have new amendments.
Some difficulty is not a bug, but the current amount of difficulty was probably not intended.
Most of the drafters understood that it was important for a government's founding document to strike a balance between two unsustainable positions: immutability (leading to a sort of tyranny of the old and dead) and excessive mutability (leading to short-term thinking and political instability). Our current approach to amending the constitution has favored the former position, to poor effect.
Yes, because it leaves constitutional meaning up, not up to the people, but up to the whims of the supreme court.
The easiest way to amend the constitution is to hold or pack the supreme court. That is dysfunctional. An easier to amend constitution, that better reflected the people's will, would likely reduce political polarization, as it would be possible to actually pass national laws that have 60 or 70% support.
The Constitution does not represent the People's will; it represents the States' will. Amendments are not passed by popular vote. The Constitution is not a human rights document; it is a document created specifically to allow the States to agree on certain baseline rights and expectations.
Yes, this is a bug, not a feature. A government that privileges certain arbitrary subdivisions over the citizenry is not great, and there's a reason that while many parts of the US constitution have been copied, that one hasn't.
Only if those boundaries are individually self-governing!
And they are not, since California and New York cannot outlaw handguns due to the influence of Wyoming and Idaho.
And as soon as you say "well the voters in Wyoming and Idaho deserve...", you've dropped any pretense of the internal boundaries mattering, because we're now just talking about federal representation, where those citizens have disproportionately large representation.
California and New York cannot ban hand guns because of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Prior to this concept the Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government. The States were free to ban guns if they wanted.
Correct, a (functional) amendment to the constitution made by the supreme court and unable to be overturned except by that body, due to the inability to amend our constitution. This is decidedly not an argument against anything I've said.
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 states are stopping an amendment repealing the 2nd amendment. The easier way to get rid of guns in California is to push for no incorporation of the 2nd amendment. The Supreme Court could do it if they wanted. You literally just need to convince 5 people.
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 precise about what it means.
>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.
They cant outlaw guns (lets not pretend) because humans have the inalienable right to -defend- themselves. And that includes against a tyrannical government. The United States would not exist otherwise[1].
Given the way you're intentionally missing the point, I think it's clear my argument hit the mark. And jutt to further clarify, it's completely possible to ban things that someone can manufacture. I'm not sure what makes you think otherwise.
I remember reading about "factions" in the Federalist papers and I have a feeling that the Founding Fathers knew such partisanship was bound to arise. And indeed, it arose very early during George Washington's presidency. I don't think the development of political parties would have caught them by surprise, especially because many of them wound up joining them as time went on.
Federalist 10 describes factions as the nature of man, explains why they don't belong in government, and describes how the Constitution limits the sway of factions. But, the Founding Fathers never envisioned it would be possible to coordinated across a continent in real time. Rapid communication allows factions/parties to have continental spread.
> Federalist 10 describes factions as the nature of man, explains why they don't belong in government, and describes how the Constitution limits the sway of factions.
Unfortunately, its claims in this regard were proven false not much more than a decade after it was published.
*> the Founding Fathers never envisioned it would be possible to coordinated across a continent in real time.
This would be a valid argument if factions did not become central to US politics until rapid communication became available. But that's not the case. Factions were already central to US politics by 1800, when the fastest mode of communication was horseback.
The Founding Fathers wrote a republican constitution and knew for a fact that as a direct consequence of the republican structure that there would be factions. That was the point of Ben Franklin's quote:
Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
> Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
Arguably, the main problem with the original rules was bullet voting in the electoral college; if they voted with preference ballots with winner elimination, instead of bullet ballots, having the second place be the VP would work well, and produce less incumbent protection even with an equally strong party system than the actual replacement system of separate election, which produced President-VP tickets.
> No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by randon luck
Yes, to the extent that the US had more peace and prosperity than, say, European states, most intelligent people with even modest knowledge attribute that not to random chance but to three major factors:
(1) The Pacific Ocean,
(2) The Atlantic Ocean,
(3) The extremely small number of remotely near-peer powers that have ever existed not separated from the US by (1) or (2).
You're right that the geography of the US confers such an advantage that it seems as though it could have had literally any form of government since its founding and still come out ahead in the end, but I'm not sure if that's actually true. There are plenty of historical examples of resource-rich (in all senses of the word "resource") nations that have failed to prosper and resource-poor nations that thrived despite their challenges. A key difference between those nations is culture and governance.
> Which of course explains why the rest of the Americas have also been so peaceful and prosperous.
The rest of the Americas benefit from (1) and (2), but most other countries have done less well with (3), in large part due to the US, which has had its “peaceful” hands in much of the conflict in the hemisphere.
The point was governmental stability, not protection against invasion. If you look at, say, France, in the same time they've had their revolution, then Napoleon, then back to monarchy, then back and forth with republics and emperors and such. They're now on the fifth version of their republic.
In the same time, the US has had the Civil War, and January 6. That's "relative peace and prosperity".
the US has been at war in some shape for form for 90% of its history, hard to call that "peaceful". a good chunk of American prosperity you can chalk up to the random luck of geography; abundant natural resources, two oceans separating from rest of the world, lack of many close neighbors, etc.
I don't reject it based on age. I reject it based on the fact that the people in question were largely slaveowners who led a revolution because the government of Britain was trying to muscle in on their tea smuggling operations, who thought that phlogiston existed, who were deists, who have nothing to teach us today.
In the same vein as GP, the validity of an idea is independent of whether the people who held them owned slaves. If you don't own slaves but think the sun rises from the west, you're still wrong.
Besides, if the only things to be learned from history are those from whom you deem morally clean, I'd wager there's precious little left at all.
When one side wants things to change and the other side wants things to "stay the same" (in order to deconstruct them), the current state of affairs is one side having the upper hand.
The US founding fathers were so worried about a tyranny of the majority they built a system where a tyranny of the minority was likely to come to pass.
> When one side wants things to change and the other side wants things to "stay the same"
You've misdescribed the sides. Most of the time in the US, one side wants to impose something on everyone and the other side doesn't want to be imposed on. Maybe the root of the problem is the idea that the only way to have "change" is to impose your views on everyone.
