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.
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/viewconten... (1997)
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/oyez.case-media.ogg/case_data/2007/...
You cant outlaw lathes and mills. Now guns are now printable. That train has left. DRM lost.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10#s-lg-box-...
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.
a republic, if you can keep itYes, 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).
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.
In the same time, the US has had the Civil War, and January 6. That's "relative peace and prosperity".
The two are related.
> If you look at, say, France, in the same time they've had their revolution
A major factor in which was allegations of the King conspiring with the governments of peer rivals against the interests of his subjects.
> then Napoleon
Who rose to power through (and as the Directory was bankrupted by) the Coalition Wars.
> then back to monarchy,
Imposed by the victors after Napoleon’s Empire was defeated in interstate war.
External security and domestic stability are not unrelated.
Does external security cause domestic government stability?
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.
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.
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.