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Comment by ern | Hacker News Reader

No less a jurist than Antonin Scalia (one of the most conservative and intellectually formidable Supreme Court justices, whatever your opinion of his positions) thought that the US Constitution was too hard to amend:

"Scalia said fewer than 2 percent of the population could prevent enactment of a constitutional amendment. “It ought to be hard, but not that hard" https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/how_scalia_and_ginsb...

The bizarre circus of Supreme Court nominees coyly pretending to be apolitical in a plainly partisan nomination process is another indicator that there's something wrong.

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The system really should be balanced such that each President gets one nomination per term.

That’s not a terrible idea, but one can imagine both parties would game the change so that it takes effect while they’ve secured a multi-term presidency and a number of justices are retiring.

How do you secure a multiterm presidency?

Was Obama ever at risk of not getting two terms considering the Republican candidates?

It's not guaranteed, but you can usually guess when Presidents are popular enough to stick around for 2 terms.

In hindsight, no, at the time, absolutely. If things had gone a bit differently, he would've failed. I mean the 2012 election was about equivalent to the 2020 election, numbers wise.

It also shouldn’t matter. He wins a second term, he gets a second SC pick. Longest serving justices get retired on a schedule.

Yeah. I agree that amending should be hard, it shouldn’t be subject to a simple 50%+1 vote count. But a supermajority should be enough. What we have is ridiculous. A supermajority of support is nowhere near enough to pass an amendment. It’s leading to the Supreme Court accruing more and more power in what’s becoming an unaccountable superlegislature. Ironically de facto giving the power to amend the Constitution to a *minority* of voters.

Consider that no amendments are currently being held up by a small minority. Congress simply isn't proposing amendments. And most likely amendments on current issues would fail to get even a simple majority of states to ratify.

The hard truth is that most amendments that get discussed today are around issues with no level of national consensus.

Scalia said this a lot. I’ve read a number of interviews with he him, and he brings it up again and again.

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