Yet dems have not had much issue with these “anti-democratic” relics until recently. It’s the classic attempt to change the rules when you’re losing the game.
Electoral college works as intended to keep super urban areas from dictating the elections as people who live in these areas aren’t representative of the entire country.
Not a single Supreme Court justice lied under oath. Senators saying they feel betrayed by them is only a sign of their own misunderstanding.
You are one of the worst and most prolific liars and promulgator of arguments and false talking points on LRC, which is to say you act in bad faith. You right wingers have lies, obfuscation, what-aboutism and minimization to make your arguments. You are nothing more than bad faith actor.
How so? Do you have anything of substance to use as rebuttal or are you only good at stringing together leftist political buzzwords?
on the bright side, you helped me complete my political BS buzzword bingo card in record time
Dems are finding that Hispanic voters are more socially conservative than they thought. That doesn’t bode well for Texas turning blue.
Ive heard more from the dems in the last 4 years about changing the constitution than any Republican. Yeah yeah, throw out January 6th as your example. That’s fine. But dems have called for: Getting rid of the electoral college, packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the filibuster, doing away with the Supreme Court and probably more that I can’t think of. Why do they want to do that? To get and keep power.
If you believe in limiting the power politicians wield, you should be ok with limiting ALL of them, not just the "other" side. BOTH parties are trying to gain absolute power and both are wrong to do it. They are not doing the will of the people. We need to elect more politicians who have backgrounds in common with the majority.
Constitutional amendments to limit terms, money and dark money in politics could help greatly, but neither party would support it despite an overwhelming majority of citizens support.
Nope. Not more of popular "both sides" bullish-t. The right wing Supreme Court killed any attempt to control dark money being fed to politicians, because corporations are people too right?
There is ONE authoritarian-leaning and anti-democratic party in the US at this time. It is widely believed among political scientists that follow current trends, that the last truly democratic national election in the US will be the one this Fall. That's not the democrats looking to bring minority one-party rule to the US, that's your right wing republicans. Take a very close look at Hungary under Orban to get a handle on what the right wing is aiming for here.
You are one of the worst and most prolific liars and promulgator of arguments and false talking points on LRC, which is to say you act in bad faith. You right wingers have lies, obfuscation, what-aboutism and minimization to make your arguments. You are nothing more than bad faith actor.
How so? Do you have anything of substance to use as rebuttal or are you only good at stringing together leftist political buzzwords?
on the bright side, you helped me complete my political BS buzzword bingo card in record time
You argue in bad faith. You are no longer worth responding to.
I believe the US Constitution is one of the best documents but it does require some changes such as adding term limits. Having said that however, I think maybe Adams was correct when he said it was written for a moral people. We are obviously not a moral people given the amount of crime, hypocrisy and support for killing babies in the womb at 9 months. Many people also think it was written for an educated citizenry which is not reflected in the above comment. My question to Court packer is “Are you knowingly using a misleading sound bite to support your position or do you really not understand why the 3/5ths compromise occurred?” This is what students in the US should have learned by the 7th grade. The compromise was required to save the Union. The second piece of critical information is which side supported which position and why. For the record, the slave states supported counting each slave as a full person. It was the anti-slave states that did not want to count slaves at all. And the significant reason for their positions was representation. The anti-slave states did not want to give the slave states more representation in the House of Representatives. Why is that so difficult for people to understand?
Your entire argument blithely ignores the obvious fact that the entire enterprise was pure poison from the start and that your beloved constitution was merely part of the poison. Any culture/civilization that so readily embraces the kidnap and enslavement of other people, as farm animals on a massive industrial scale, is broken from the outset. The drafters of our foundational documents forced accommodation for their own vile ownership of people, which means that their documents were morally bankrupt then and are worth even less now.
The constitution is fruit from the poison tree. Right along with an actual reckoning regarding this country's most vile original sin, the entire structure and underlying assumptions about representation and governance desperately call for remaking in the US.
I'm not ignoring that the entire enterprise was poison. I'm simply facing reality that there had to be compromise in order to move to a position that could eventually remove the poison.
The original comment is a point that is constantly misrepresented. The slave states did not want the 3/5ths rule. They wanted a 100% rule (for census counting). Would that have made this a better document? Would it have been a better document if the anti-slave states had less representation and potentially less power to stop the poison? Without the compromise instead of one country there would have been at least two countries and the slave countries would not have ended slavery for decades after the 1860's and possibly Jim Crow laws would still be legal. The 3/5ths compromise was a required first step.
You make it sound like the constitution should have never been written. Without the constitution, the federal government would have had no authority to eventual end the poison.
I happen to believe the the constitution set the framework for the US to develop and improve. What other countries have as many people trying to enter as the US? Despite its flaws, it is still the most popular destination for immigrants.
Arguing that the EC is "more fair" is braindead. Obviously 1 vote = 1 vote for president is the fairest.
You can argue that it is a better system to bias votes from certain areas (FL, OH, PA), but it seems insane to argue that it's more fair that a Florida vote matters much much more than a California vote.
If a new constitution was written today I guarantee it would mean much less freedom for the ordinary citizen and a much more powerful federal government.
Thank God the founding fathers were essentially proponents of states’ rights and a “night watchman” federal government.
The rest of the modern world looks at us like a third world country with first world amenities
US hasn't thrived in the past 250 years? I wonder why people around the world line up outside US embassies waiting years for a visa? Or risk their lives crossing the deserts and oceans trying to get here? They must not have gotten the memo about how repressed Americans are.
I always love this argument.
The United States is the most immigrated to country in the world (and it really isn’t close). We must be doing something right.
The second the Republican Party figures out they'll get Whatever They Want by writing a new constitution, they will.
Just watch when Texas turns blue, which will happen in our lifetimes. The USA will have a new constitution by noon the next day.
Dems are finding that Hispanic voters are more socially conservative than they thought. That doesn’t bode well for Texas turning blue.
Ive heard more from the dems in the last 4 years about changing the constitution than any Republican. Yeah yeah, throw out January 6th as your example. That’s fine. But dems have called for: Getting rid of the electoral college, packing the Supreme Court, doing away with the filibuster, doing away with the Supreme Court and probably more that I can’t think of. Why do they want to do that? To get and keep power.
Most of these suggestions don’t involve the Constitution. I’m not sure I see the need for a new Constitution but it would be great to have some electoral reform — electoral college is totally antiquated and has been for 100 years.
Dems and progressives had no problem with the senate, electoral college or SCOTUS for the 40 years that they held most of the power.
Now that they are out of power, they want to say that the system needs changing? Maybe it’s not the system, maybe it’s you and the people in your party. Dems have moved more to the left and people don’t like it. All this social and cultural justice stuff turns a lot of voters away.
Polling shows that conservatives are more likely to have friends who have different political views than themselves. Progressives aren’t likely at all to befriend people of the other political side. They can’t relate to anything going on right now because they live in a bubble.
There’s nothing wrong with the constitution, just the mental toughness of a political party who wants to take their call and go home, or worse yet, want to turn the constitution into Calvin Ball.
You aren't keeping up with where your country is going. It is becoming increasingly polarised while the prospect of a majority consensus is disappearing. Bi-partisan solutions are receding. This is reflected in the prevailing view that the losers in an election - or a court decision - should just suck it up and go home. That is a winner takes all approach which can split a nation - as it did in 1860. "A house divided cannot stand" - as Lincoln said. You're heading there again.
The Constitution should be a force for unifying a nation on the basis of a common set of principles. It has now become a weapon in partisan politics, to impose the will of an extreme minority over the majority - as this SCOTUS has just demonstrated.
You are not even American. Why does your opinion matter?
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They knew what was best for the US even 250 years ago
I don't understand why the US constitution is weirdly revered by people in this country. It was fairly forward thinking for its time... but it was written almost 250 years ago. I think it's safe to say the world has changed pretty dramatically over the course of a quarter of a millennium.
You mean they didn't have the internet, mobile phones, electricity, cars, planes, and AR-15's back when the American Constitution was first written?
The Constitution is nothing more than a compromise made during the founding in order to get the agrarian slave states in the South on board with forming a national government. The senate, electoral college, 2/3rds constitutional amendment process and even 2nd amendment ("militias" was a reference to southern militias that put down slave revolts and supported slave patrols that hunted runaway slaves). The slave states feared immediate abolition of slavery by a national government and negotiated for countermajoritarian institutions to ensure that slavery would persist after forming a national government. Unfortunately, the leaders from the northern states were all too happy to go along as they were not comfortable with extending control over the government to the "rabble" and wanted to be sure that the new landed aristocracy of the new world was protected from the whims of the masses.
The resulting "Republican" form of government (as in "Republic" and not GOP) has been a mess. Having 50 different DMVs, taxing authorities, courts, business licensing and registration, agriculture, alcoholic beverage commission, etc. is a massive impediment to anyone who desires to engage in any endeavor that crosses state lines. And with recent supreme court opinions, it turns states into mini fiefdoms where self interested politicians basically troll the federal government and political opponents by spending all their time on anti-vaxxer BS and CRT instead of actually running a government and improving people's material conditions. Step one would be to end states and have one country. There is no reason to have a different process to get a vehicle title in California from Florida. A car is a car. And so on.
Get rid of the Senate and the electoral college. Get rid of the second amendment.
Human nature, and the requirements for human life to flourish, don’t change over time. The original constitution was based on the philosophical discoveries of the Enlightenment—we call that liberalism, and it is the exact opposite of what today’s “liberals” stand for. When people want to overthrow the US constitution, what they’re really saying is that they want to bring back the Dark Ages, a time when individuals were the property of the local despot and had no legal rights.
Human nature, and the requirements for human life to flourish, don’t change over time. The original constitution was based on the philosophical discoveries of the Enlightenment—we call that liberalism, and it is the exact opposite of what today’s “liberals” stand for. When people want to overthrow the US constitution, what they’re really saying is that they want to bring back the Dark Ages, a time when individuals were the property of the local despot and had no legal rights.
That's not what I'm saying at all. If you'd read my other posts you'd see I'm still advocating for a western style liberal democracy, just with a new constitution.
Also, like I stated before, the human nature argument is total un-empirical bs; our perception of "human nature" is not removable from our "situatedness" in a particular cultural/ideological framework .
Human nature, and the requirements for human life to flourish, don’t change over time. The original constitution was based on the philosophical discoveries of the Enlightenment—we call that liberalism, and it is the exact opposite of what today’s “liberals” stand for. When people want to overthrow the US constitution, what they’re really saying is that they want to bring back the Dark Ages, a time when individuals were the property of the local despot and had no legal rights.
And yeah, the US Constitution was ripped almost directly from Locke's Second Treatise of Government. I've read it a number of times. I've also read Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Mill. I'm familiar with the concept of "liberalism."
The Constitution is nothing more than a compromise made during the founding in order to get the agrarian slave states in the South on board with forming a national government. The senate, electoral college, 2/3rds constitutional amendment process and even 2nd amendment ("militias" was a reference to southern militias that put down slave revolts and supported slave patrols that hunted runaway slaves). The slave states feared immediate abolition of slavery by a national government and negotiated for countermajoritarian institutions to ensure that slavery would persist after forming a national government. Unfortunately, the leaders from the northern states were all too happy to go along as they were not comfortable with extending control over the government to the "rabble" and wanted to be sure that the new landed aristocracy of the new world was protected from the whims of the masses.
The resulting "Republican" form of government (as in "Republic" and not GOP) has been a mess. Having 50 different DMVs, taxing authorities, courts, business licensing and registration, agriculture, alcoholic beverage commission, etc. is a massive impediment to anyone who desires to engage in any endeavor that crosses state lines. And with recent supreme court opinions, it turns states into mini fiefdoms where self interested politicians basically troll the federal government and political opponents by spending all their time on anti-vaxxer BS and CRT instead of actually running a government and improving people's material conditions. Step one would be to end states and have one country. There is no reason to have a different process to get a vehicle title in California from Florida. A car is a car. And so on.
Get rid of the Senate and the electoral college. Get rid of the second amendment.
Seems your main gripe is federalism.
I assume you are going to move to California as soon as possible. Strictest gun laws in the nation and big enough you can avoid dealing with the inferior states if that is what you want. Big on vaccines and lockdowns and such also, which you were a big proponent of.
Federalism lets you vote with your feet, and what is clear is that they are voting against New York and California and for Texas and Florida.
The Constitution can be amended. It can be changed through a Constitutionally legal process, therefore there is no need for a new constitution. If there is a political will for change, it can be done.
Stop and think what might go wrong if we were to throw away to constitution. Are you so sure you will get what you want in a new constitution? Stop for a moment and do a risk/reward analysis on that one.