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This is why the American system is superior. The representational nature of it allows minority voices. While sweeping changes, e.g., constitutional amendments,

This is why the American system is superior. The representational nature of it allows minority voices. While sweeping changes, e.g., constitutional amendments, require a 3/5s majority of the states. The grid lock is by design.

disabled 6y ago
It’s not a superior system when Americans’ votes carry an unequal weight or are outright suppressed. That is not a properly functioning democracy, and what you described above can be exploited to the extreme in such a case. Ultimately, we got lucky this past election, as in “unicorn levels”. What is going on in America is far from over and is going to ultimately be a generational struggle.
- agensaequivocum 6y ago
  No that is the literal design, as we are not a pure democratic system. The whole point is that states are sovereign except in a few specific areas, e.g., foreign relations, interstate commerce. The founders were terrified of a tyranny of the majority. So they designed a system that made it difficult. We did not get lucky.
  - martimarkov 6y ago
    When my vote != everyone else's vote that is not a democracy. Just because everyone gets a say but we listen to these people more doesn't mean you have a democratic system. If anything you can for sure say it's not democratic.
    - refurb 6y ago
      That's because you're ignoring that it's the united states. Not one massive state. And again, that's intentional.
    - agensaequivocum 6y ago
      Yeah because we are a constitutional republic. The founders were not a fan of pure democracy for good reasons.
- refurb 6y ago
  No, it's a "feature" not a "bug". The design was entirely intentional. How are American's votes equally weighted if 4 states (really 4 metro areas) get to decide who the president is every election?
  - disabled 6y ago
    Because it is about people being equal, not areas being equal. That is the problem.
    - nyokodo 6y ago
      No it isn’t. It’s about citizens of the largest metro areas in the country, ridiculously skewed to one party, wanting to rule over the rest of the country with no hope of being opposed. The Founders anticipated this thankfully and set up the electoral college and the sovereignty of the states.
    - agensaequivocum 6y ago
      People are equal but their representation within the federal government is unequal because the states are sovereign. The federal government is supposed to do very little. Constitution gives it a few enumerated powers. Everything else is left to the states. However, beginning the the 20th century the feds began to vastly encroach on many areas by abusing the "interstate commerce" clause. For example, the court ruled the fed could limit an individual from growing "too much" wheat on his own property for his own consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn. Or perhaps a still existing federal law that prohibits a handgun from being pissed within 1000ft of a school.
ern 6y ago
It’s interesting that you would say that constitutional gridlock is by design, and that the US constitution being extremely difficult to amend is a good thing. No less a conservative jurist than Antonin Scalia repeatedly pointed out that he believed the US constitution was too hard to amend...amendments could be blocked by 2% of the population. [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/amending-the-constitution-is-much-too-hard-blame-the-founders.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/amending-the-con...] To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal. You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress. You talk about the difficulty of amending the constitution, but how does that relate to the controversy around judicial appointments? When France and Germany legalized abortion, same sex marriage, etc., they didn’t amend the constitution. They just passed a law. But liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress to pass those laws. So they got it done through the courts. And then they create a controversy around judicial appointments because conservative jurists foreclose that strategy. With respect to hot-button judicial issues in the US, the courts in Europe is a lot more like the American conservatives than the American liberals. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found that there was no fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-non-existence-of-a-right-to-gay-marriage https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That was the year after the United States Supreme Court found exactly the opposite. Around the same time as Roe v. Wade several courts in Europe considered the same issue. None concludes there was an expansive right to abortion: https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2524&context=lawreview https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2... > These decisions seem to reflect several possible solutions. At one end of the spectrum is the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that the U.S. Constitution prohibits abortion legislation designed to protect the life of the unborn prior to viability. At the other end of the spectrum is the decision of the West German Constitutional Court which held that the State has an affirmative duty to protect the unborn life at all stages of pregnancy. To this day Roe remains an aberration in the developed world. Under it, the government can’t ban abortion (even with exceptions for emergencies) prior to viability, at the end of the second trimester. Under Roe the abortion laws of nearly every European country would be unconstitutional. (Only the UK’s would pass muster. Most prohibit elective abortion after the first trimester.) Difficulty of amending the constitution is irrelevant, because the controversy is caused by things that can’t get enough support nationwide for ordinary legislation.

disabled 6y ago

It’s not a superior system when Americans’ votes carry an unequal weight or are outright suppressed. That is not a properly functioning democracy, and what you described above can be exploited to the extreme in such a case. Ultimately, we got lucky this past election, as in “unicorn levels”. What is going on in America is far from over and is going to ultimately be a generational struggle.

agensaequivocum 6y ago
No that is the literal design, as we are not a pure democratic system. The whole point is that states are sovereign except in a few specific areas, e.g., foreign relations, interstate commerce. The founders were terrified of a tyranny of the majority. So they designed a system that made it difficult. We did not get lucky.
- martimarkov 6y ago
  When my vote != everyone else's vote that is not a democracy. Just because everyone gets a say but we listen to these people more doesn't mean you have a democratic system. If anything you can for sure say it's not democratic.
  - refurb 6y ago
    That's because you're ignoring that it's the united states. Not one massive state. And again, that's intentional.
  - agensaequivocum 6y ago
    Yeah because we are a constitutional republic. The founders were not a fan of pure democracy for good reasons.
refurb 6y ago
No, it's a "feature" not a "bug". The design was entirely intentional. How are American's votes equally weighted if 4 states (really 4 metro areas) get to decide who the president is every election?
- disabled 6y ago
  Because it is about people being equal, not areas being equal. That is the problem.
  - nyokodo 6y ago
    No it isn’t. It’s about citizens of the largest metro areas in the country, ridiculously skewed to one party, wanting to rule over the rest of the country with no hope of being opposed. The Founders anticipated this thankfully and set up the electoral college and the sovereignty of the states.
  - agensaequivocum 6y ago
    People are equal but their representation within the federal government is unequal because the states are sovereign. The federal government is supposed to do very little. Constitution gives it a few enumerated powers. Everything else is left to the states. However, beginning the the 20th century the feds began to vastly encroach on many areas by abusing the "interstate commerce" clause. For example, the court ruled the fed could limit an individual from growing "too much" wheat on his own property for his own consumption. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn. Or perhaps a still existing federal law that prohibits a handgun from being pissed within 1000ft of a school.

ern 6y ago

It’s interesting that you would say that constitutional gridlock is by design, and that the US constitution being extremely difficult to amend is a good thing. No less a conservative jurist than Antonin Scalia repeatedly pointed out that he believed the US constitution was too hard to amend...amendments could be blocked by 2% of the population. [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/amending-the-constitution-is-much-too-hard-blame-the-founders.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/amending-the-con...] To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.

rayiner 6y ago
> To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal. You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress. You talk about the difficulty of amending the constitution, but how does that relate to the controversy around judicial appointments? When France and Germany legalized abortion, same sex marriage, etc., they didn’t amend the constitution. They just passed a law. But liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress to pass those laws. So they got it done through the courts. And then they create a controversy around judicial appointments because conservative jurists foreclose that strategy. With respect to hot-button judicial issues in the US, the courts in Europe is a lot more like the American conservatives than the American liberals. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found that there was no fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-non-existence-of-a-right-to-gay-marriage https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That was the year after the United States Supreme Court found exactly the opposite. Around the same time as Roe v. Wade several courts in Europe considered the same issue. None concludes there was an expansive right to abortion: https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2524&context=lawreview https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2... > These decisions seem to reflect several possible solutions. At one end of the spectrum is the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that the U.S. Constitution prohibits abortion legislation designed to protect the life of the unborn prior to viability. At the other end of the spectrum is the decision of the West German Constitutional Court which held that the State has an affirmative duty to protect the unborn life at all stages of pregnancy. To this day Roe remains an aberration in the developed world. Under it, the government can’t ban abortion (even with exceptions for emergencies) prior to viability, at the end of the second trimester. Under Roe the abortion laws of nearly every European country would be unconstitutional. (Only the UK’s would pass muster. Most prohibit elective abortion after the first trimester.) Difficulty of amending the constitution is irrelevant, because the controversy is caused by things that can’t get enough support nationwide for ordinary legislation.