6 ms·

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

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.

giantg2 4y ago
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.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  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.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Endlessly bending the structures of law just makes them snap that much harder when they break under the pressure. It's not a good thing.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    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.
jeffbee 4y ago
No rational person gives a damn what some guys who died 200 years ago would have thought about our present.
- cvwright 4y ago
  No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by random luck.
  - xxpor 4y ago
    I don't consider 1860-1964 to be relatively peaceful.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      A war every now and again is relatively peaceful.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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).
    - cvwright 4y ago
      Which of course explains why the rest of the Americas have also been so peaceful and prosperous.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        > 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.
      - deleted 4y ago
nikanj 4y ago
I think the Founding Fathers pictured the government as being democrats and republicans versus problems, not democrats versus republicans.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  They didn't even intend for a party system to take hold
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > 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.
      - zerocrates 4y ago
        The 12th Amendment enshrined tickets, certainly, but they were already present by the election of 1800.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  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.
runnerup 4y ago
Or constant flip-flopping. 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]). 0: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6918&context=jclc https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten... (1997)
ISL 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
woodruffw 4y ago
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.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  How?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    How what?
stormbrew 4y ago
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.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > 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.
joshuamorton 4y ago
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.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  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.
  - joshuamorton 4y ago
    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.
    - jakeogh 4y ago
      Boundaries, states in this case, but it's a general principal, are exactly what give the people within them self-determination.
      - joshuamorton 4y ago
        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.
nonethewiser 4y ago
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.

giantg2 4y ago

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.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
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.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  Endlessly bending the structures of law just makes them snap that much harder when they break under the pressure. It's not a good thing.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  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.

jeffbee 4y ago

No rational person gives a damn what some guys who died 200 years ago would have thought about our present.

cvwright 4y ago
No intelligent person thinks that we got 250 years of relative peace and prosperity by random luck.
- xxpor 4y ago
  I don't consider 1860-1964 to be relatively peaceful.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    A war every now and again is relatively peaceful.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > 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).
  - cvwright 4y ago
    Which of course explains why the rest of the Americas have also been so peaceful and prosperous.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > 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.
    - deleted 4y ago

nikanj 4y ago

I think the Founding Fathers pictured the government as being democrats and republicans versus problems, not democrats versus republicans.

advisedwang 4y ago
They didn't even intend for a party system to take hold
- zerocrates 4y ago
  Famously the original presidential election rules don't really work in the face of partisanship and President-VP tickets and they quickly were replaced.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      The 12th Amendment enshrined tickets, certainly, but they were already present by the election of 1800.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
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.

runnerup 4y ago

Or constant flip-flopping. 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]). 0: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6918&context=jclc https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten... (1997)

ISL 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

woodruffw 4y ago

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.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
How?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  How what?

stormbrew 4y ago

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.

pdonis 4y ago
> 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.

joshuamorton 4y ago

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.

nathanaldensr 4y ago
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.
- joshuamorton 4y ago
  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.
  - jakeogh 4y ago
    Boundaries, states in this case, but it's a general principal, are exactly what give the people within them self-determination.
    - joshuamorton 4y ago
      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.

nonethewiser 4y ago

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.