Constitutional amendments were supposed to be easier than right to rebellion. That’s not really the case any more. At the same time, the supreme court is just ignoring the law, over the objections of 66-75% of the population (depending on the ruling).
These are dark times for US democracy. There’s no evidence things are working as intended.
The US system has little d democratic aspects but it is not a democracy. It was intentionally setup to protect the minority from the majority in critical respects like constitutional amendments. Also, population shifts are ongoing and the coastal blue populations are the most rapidly aging in the country and the increasingly red US born Hispanic populations are the most rapidly growing. The future may contain some surprises.
But they also have longer lifespans by a couple of years.
> increasingly red US born Hispanic populations are the most rapidly growing.
A lot of those US born Hispanics are in California and very blue (thanks to Pete Wilson).
...of the opulent, is the quote.
No, they aren’t. [0]
> the increasingly red US born Hispanic populations are the most rapidly growing.
The Hispanic population isn’t clearly “increasingly red”. [1] It is also growing slower (between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, 23%) than the Asian (35.5%), American Indian (27.1%), and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (27.8%) groups, as well as various multiracial groups. [2]
[0] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/populati...
[1] https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/389093/hispa...
[2] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/improved-race...
You're own link seems to indicate that Hispanics are shifting to the away from the Democratic party. (In the article, it says they follow a muted version of national trajectory). While that's not the same as saying they are becoming "increasingly red", it is important to note they may be "increasingly less blue."
Further, the objections of the population have nothing to do with the judicial branch and everything to do with the legislative branch. The courts are not and have never been democratically elected entities.
P.S. minorities here could mean anything i.e the mega rich, the “legal” cartels, etc.
Abusing any population, is abusing a population. What you just argued is akin to walking into a room full of pregnant high school girls, and declaring one to be the "most" virgin.
Besides, the point of the Constitution, is to make it difficult for such things to happen in one direction or another in the political dimension. Which it does pretty well. If you want it to provide protections in the dimension of private economic activity, you can do that, just make an amendment and build a consensus.
If this new amendment which you draft to ostensibly protect this "majority", can't build the requisite consensus, then not only is it doubtful that it actually protects a majority, but it also shouldn't be an amendment. That's just democracy since the "majority" you claim to be serving doesn't seem to want the amendment.
But then I saw Samuel Alito commenting just today about how the first amendment does not give Americans, and college students specifically, the right to shout fire in a crowded theatre. The fire in a crowded theatre standard was overturned in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). So it’s a little odd to hear that the Schenck interpretation from fifty years earlier is back on the menu.
I find myself wondering how that happened. What’s the fine distinction between interpreting the law differently to precedent and ignoring settled law?
According to Wikipedia that standard was explicitly upheld as the example of speech that would be prosecuted.
Alito claimed* that the 'fire in a crowded theatre' standard should be applied to today's college campuses, essentially because he has strong views on how free speech should/shouldn't be regulated at college. It seems to me that he's taking issue specifically with the right of students to engage in political speech and protest. The current court seems to have a particular distaste for case law from the civil rights era. I think he's deciding to bring this exact issue up because he wants to signal to any prospective plaintiff what rulings and precedents the court is likely to focus on in a hypothetical case. But he did that by deliberately misapplying the relevance of a widely-known and easily-misunderstood civil rights-era standard. It feels like he's doing that to taunt his political opponents and signal his preference for an earlier legal regime.
My point is that it's fair to question whether the court is actually behaving like a legislature: it's concentrating on case law that specifically affects social policy and it's doing that because it has a majority's muscle. As a foreigner, I can't explain how insane this looks from outside. Judges don't get to just show up to cocktail parties or speeches and single out the precedents they'd prefer to ignore or dispense with. That's a politician's job.
* https://lawandcrime.com/supreme-court/justice-alito-takes-di...
I think they were more worried about entire _states_ going into rebellion and not factions of populations spread across them.
> These are dark times for US democracy.
I don't think that's warranted. I would say these are the growing pains of a country now fully entering the age of always available connectivity with a founding document created when horse travel was the only credible way to travel across it.
> There’s no evidence things are working as intended.
You could say this of many things. The highly monopolized state of our media in the face of this new era is definitely a baffling outcome, and I definitely spend a lot of time thinking about the connection between this and the previous statement.
SCOTUS can be overruled by the states themselves via amendments. They’re not ignoring law at all.
I for one would fear living in a country where the courts were swayed by public sentiment.
For example, Amy Barrett was confirmed by a vote of 55-43, including 3 Democrats.
I'm not sure why you mention "a national majority". It was never a popularity contest. States elect senators, senators confirm Supreme Court justices.
The voters elect senators, who nominate candidates and then vote.
The senate judiciary committee will vote, then the candidate is voted on by the entire senate.
Regardless, the confirmation process is conducted by elected representatives. There is no "this party chose them".
Which has happened quite often?
Now, it causes a political circus.
In fact, the more we demand that it match that profile, the less independent it’s likely to become.
You can't really make that claim, objectively.
US elections aren't decided by national majority, so you can't use them as a measure of national majority.
If the game was different, people would play it differently.
And courts should be "swayed by public sentiment". A judge's job is "to judge", and general societal attitudes play part of that. This is why SCOTUS rulings from 1910 are not the same as today. Otherwise we might as well replace all courts with some AI that would interpret the law to the letter.
That's problematic.
Part of the function of courts and judges is to convince people not to "take the law into their own hands", and mete-out punishment by mob. That incentivizes courts to hand-down more severe sentences, especially in scandalous cases. Another part is to interpret the law fairly (Justice as Fairness), a function that is often at odds with the former function.
I don't think it's at all the business of courts to try to appease the mob; that leads inevitably to trial-by-tabloid, which is no kind of justice.
In 1986 the SCOTUS rules that consensual homosexual sex in private could be banned (Bowers v. Hardwick). Such a ruling would be almost unthinkable today, and was already overturned in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas). All the arguments used in 1986 and 2003 could still be used today because the constitution hasn't changed, but what is and isn't societally acceptable on this front very much has.
I'm not talking about whatever was in the papers this week, or the opinion polls this year, or whatever Biden or Trump or whomever said last week, I'm talking about broad and general shifts in attitudes that take place over years and decades.
Suffice to say, both parties' presidents have nominated Supreme Court justices that never made it past confirmation. Despite the voting procedure, both parties need to find nominees that are at least palatable to some portion of both parties. Extremes in either direction are generally dropped pretty quickly.
And courts are swayed by public sentiment, but it generally takes a long time for such social sentiment to filter up to the courts. And that's a good thing. The last thing we need is a court that decides cases on the whim's and fancies of the average voter.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/
1. The 17th amendment (1912) - Electing senators by popular vote broke the state representation in the federal government. States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty.
2. The federal reserve act (1913) - enables government to self-fund by printing money and enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank.
3. The 16th amendment (1913) - Federal income tax - allows the federal government to directly tax citizens for the first time.
Those three amendments, in effect, decimated the federal system and centralized power. After that, they could pass what ever they wanted.
IMO the internet is re-igniting a public debate and push towards populism -- that and that's why you saw the 2008 rise of Ron Paul, Occupy Wallstreet, Tea Party, Bernie Sandars and now MAGA.
(yes, it was coupled with a financial crisis, but the government response led to push back).
Read Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work. This is the way.
How do you think you're going to reduce poverty and create wealth without capitalism?
Both the USSR and China both went through (at different times!) great famines due to their collectivization of agriculture. Further, their agricultural practices in general were learned from the capitalist countries and neither produced / produce enough. Both the USSR and China did / currently rely heavily on food imports.
Arguably, they only escaped feudalism because capitalistic countries provided enough cheap food to the global market to transition their economies off of mass labor in fields (the basis of feudalism).
didn't the ussr squeeze those farmers so tight to get industral equipment out of the capitalists by trading grain? yes, the capitalists graciously supported the ussr, the cold war was actually a big hug!
because they traded with capitalist nations they couldn't have existed without capitalism. sure, actually that was the theory at the time, that industrialized germany would join them in a mutually beneficial relationship. that didn't happen for some reason.
but what if we flip it? because capitalist nations traded with slave states and feudal nations, they couldn't have existed without slavery and feudalsim. because capitalist nations trade with violently repressive plutocracies, they can't exist without violently repressive plutocracy. seem fair?
how were china and the ussr organized is the actual question.
maybe you assume technological development was caused by capitalism. personally i think that's putting the cart before the horse.
It was probably because they had to build a wall to keep the citizens of the territory they were occupying from escaping communism.
To put it simply, the famine was primarily impacting Cossacks, which were throughout southern Russia at the time. You can look up the famines and see it’s not specifically targeted.
Though I do grant you, collective farming was the issue and it did have an undue impact in Ukraine.
Russia: purges, torture then murder of 'kulaks', Holodomor, Virgin Lands campaign, etc. Total deaths, estimate at least 30 million; Solzhenitsyn said 66 million.
None of those combined 70 million+ made it out of poverty.
Or was it the other way around?
Huh? Previously, state representatives elected senators; after the 17th, the voters did. How does either of these things end "state representation" ? You're insisting that "state representation" can only mean "representation of the people already elected by the voters", which is unjustifiably narrow.
> enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank.
Do you recall the situation before this?
> allows the federal government to directly tax citizens for the first time.
tricky to fight international wars without this, which obviously you could view as a plus.
Bullshit.
The smaller the democratic unit, the more likely it is to be unduly influenced by local power and wealth. State reps are far more likely to represent the interests of the local power and wealth than they are "their state" (by which I mean "the people of their state")
Who’s their boss? At the moment senators answer to the people of a state, previously they answered to state government.
This changes the reasoning of why we have laws at the federal level. The senators representing a state would be fired for giving up sovereignty; not so for those elected via popular vote. Those elected by popular vote are incentivized to give out goodies to the masses.
State legislators could easily fire and switch senators. Public opinion on the senators didn’t matter nearly as much. If a person of a state wanted influence over the senators they had to focus on local elections.
There’s a whole lot of changes, not really sure what’s being missed?
There's another critical date: 1971. That was the year that Nixon ended the Bretton Woods System. [1] Bretton Woods was a defacto global* monetary system. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar was convertible to gold at a fixed rate. This created a sort of soft backing to the dollar.
After it ended the final constraint the 'government printing' (this is not an entirely accurate description of the process, but close enough for practical purposes) infinite money became a viable option; one which they have vigorously pursued since. The above link offers a number of fun graphs demonstrating the changes revolving about that date.
When a federal government can go tens of trillions of dollars in debt, that absolutely destroys any sort of economic normalcy. Because they can offer what's, from their perspective, monopoly money for real services while the rest of the economy is forced to use real money. This applies not only to businesses, but also states - which are constrained by financial realities.
I suspect when this current system we've created blows up, it's going to make 1929 look like a bull market.
I don't think it will completely blow up, but there will be enough economic pain inflicted such that the ordinary person will be happy to accept a central bank digital currency.
The cogs are already turning: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/g7-public-policy-...
Half the country wants nothing to do with the federal government. If you visit places like South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, Indiana, etc the people there are openly saying “prepare, the government is attacking us”
Driving around the country you’ll see upside down American flags (meaning country in distress), gadsden flags, etc you’re much more likely going to get people to accept ETH then take over the org or something.
This is an entirely inaccurate description of the process. Only countries were allowed to purchase gold for $35 an ounce, with the assumption that they would also "buy" $35 with an ounce of gold. This would ordinarily be considered a bad deal because the dollar had already drastically inflated since 1934, but Europe and Japan were desperate for liquidity to rebuild from WWII, so they were happy to trade physical gold for what was essentially slips of paper. When the US noticed that they were increasingly trying to trade these slips of paper into gold, the US ended the ability to do so. Saying that the end of Bretton Woods was a bad decision is really just saying that you want the US to instantly become bankrupt.
There is no reason to peg your currency to an arbitrary metal. If the government wanted to stop itself from printing money, it would simply stop printing money. Bretton Woods was actually a weaker protection against "printing money" than say a debt ceiling because Nixon was able to reverse kill Bretton Woods single handedly, whereas raising the debt ceiling requires an act from Congress.
The government was always able to do that. Independent central banking made it harder, not easier (that’s why independent central banking helps trust in the currency, because it divorces monetary from fiscal policy, and helping maintain trust in the currency is why you do it.)
So it's not so much that half the country is dead against particular measures because of their merits or values, but they will be set against change it simply because the other side wants it.
Because it serves to maintain a delicate balance: donors fill the coffers of both parties and offer cushy jobs after their term in office, and in return politicians don't pass any legislation that can meaningfully threaten the bottom line of those donors, even though that kind of legislation would actually help the most people and be quite popular. This is why large corporations donate almost equally to both parties, from defense contractors to pharma.
Instead of those meaningful changes which would unite the country, politicians set up culture war issues to set half the country against the other half, because culture war issues are semantic language games where nobody wins and everybody loses. It's bikeshedding writ large.
Relying on consensus to get things done AND designing a system to prevent consensus (party system, FPTP etc) is really just a recipe for deadlocked government. The result is the main failing of the US system: things are dictated by the craziest holdout.
I don't think this is a design choice (thinking so would be pretty damning for the founding fathers...). I don't think it serves the US well. I think it is only how the system "should" work in the sense that it is the natural failure mode of the system as written. If a bad, rushed coder fails to put divide by zero protection in, the program "should" crash when someone puts a 0 in. That doesn't mean that isn't a bug to fix though...
For example, I can read the second amendment --
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It is clear the national firearms act is outright unconstitutional by any sane reading, yet it was deemed "okay" by SCOTUS and passed by congress. The amendment was ignored for nearly 80 years and finally opinion seems to be shifting.
In a similar vein, the supreme court previously created a problematic "roe v wade" ruling. Regardless where you stand on the issue, SCOTUS effectively legislated that decision into existence. There was never any support in the constitution for their claims (the cut-off date in particular) or any laws passed (hence it was overturned and returned to the states). It's called "legislating from the bench".
In other words, our constitution is interpreted by a court which can just decide it means something that it doesn't.
It seems we can't repeal the amendments, but we sure can ignore them. And we can't create new amendments, but we sure can just implement them (Roe v Wade).
Personally, I'd like to see the constitution fully implemented to the furthest possible extent. We may disagree on issues, but to the point, we can amend them. A full implementation would also create more sovereign states which enable a diversity of ideas and plethora of ways to live.
Just to be clear, you're incorrect. The bill of rights was extremely clear, the intent was that every citizen should be armed. Recall at the time, the states had to call on citizens to defend their towns, states and country regularly. They didn't have money and needed the citizens to have their own weapons. For both personal and collective defense.
> The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that... it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. - Thomas Jefferson
That said, there has always been a push from various political groups (all the way back to John Adams) who pushed to regulate arms in one-way-or-another. The point is, the reading itself is clear. If you read the various diaries, letters, speeches and publications at the time it paints a picture much like today. There are those who want a disarmed population fearing rebellion and those who demand an armed population. The group that won out on the amendment were clear: "There shall be no law regulating arms and you should be proficient in their use"
"It was good to have a gun when the clansmen came" -Justice Anton Scalia
which is why prohabition never happened.
At the time (and still to this day) alcohol and drugs made and destroyed empires. The Dutch Empire was based on Gin. The British Empire on Opium and Rhum. Russia on Vodka. France had Bourbon.
Is that a bit like "the sun stopped coming up, until the sun came up the next day" ?
I have never seen this claim made before and would like some evidence for it.
I think you mean, that nearly everyone became a criminal overnight when Prohibition was passed, because they didn't just stop drinking.
“decade” is quite optimistic.
Self determination is a widely recognized political right. If folks in Alabama don’t want folks in California to have a say in their affairs, they have that right. That must be balanced against other practicalities of course. But letting different groups govern themselves is conceptually part of “democracy” just as much as “one person one vote.”
The concept of a split US is not unattractive to a much larger number of people than you might be willing to give credit. There's also the people that will support a movement not because they fully support it, but mainly just because it's screwing the "system" and watching the chaos.
Back in the mid-90s, I was a video journalist covering the Republic of Texas[0] movement to secede (or in their words to recognize the illegality of Texas being annexed into the Union). It was very interesting how it was successfully progressing through the court system, but then went to crazy town with all of the liens, attempting to print their own money, and the kidnappings. However, there were the typical people denouncing their US citizenship and signing up to join to the Republic of Texas. The thing that surprised me was the governments of other countries signed up in recognition of the RoT as a legit government. I get that individual peoples wanting to see the world burn, but seeing governments sign up for it was what got me.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_secession_movements#Repu...
The Supreme Court has previously erroneously ruled that the federal government had the authority to stop it despite that power not having been granted to the federal government.
Supreme Court Justice Salmon P. Chase in 1869, Chief Justice at the time:
"When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the State. The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States."
1. The founders wholly rejected that notion. The Declaration of Independence says
>When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation
>That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness
>But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
The Colonies were allowed to rid themselves of the British Government but the states aren't allowed to rid themselves of the American government? That makes no sense. The Founding Fathers would have had no issue with secession. Either the American Revolution was illegitimate or the southern one was legitimate. The British Empire made the same argument that the Supreme Court did. The British were wrong just like the Court.
2. If a state cannot leave, then how did the Southern States become military districts? Where in the Constitution does it give the federal government the right to strip states of statehood?
3. There was consent of the states who left to leave. I'm not sure why another state needs to be involved since the 10th amendment doesn't require the consent of other states.
4. If you have a glass of water. You take a sip of water you still have a glass of water. If a state leaves the Union you still have a union. If changing the amount of state destroys the union then I am not sure how adding to the Union does not do the same.
The Supreme Court ruled this way to provide cover for the unconstitutional actions of the federal government. They banned actions that were both allowed and they themselves did. To use a word from the Deceleration of Independence, that is despotism.
This was a key point that the 90s Republic of Texas movement keyed on, and they would tell anyone within earshot about why all Texas flags in courts are trimmed in gold fringe.
It was supposed to be part of the stipulations Texas had in the agreement to re-join the Union. At least that is part of Texas folklore. However, they were coming at it from a different direction in saying that the annexing was not done legally, so it should just naturally revert back to how it was before the illegal annexing.
We're actually seeing something similar but different currently in how part of Oregon wants to become part of Idaho.
>What if a National vote was held and a majority agreed to split up the USA?
It might not be a national vote, but a civil war ending in a stale mate would essentially do just that. Think Handmaid's Tale's Gilead.
> At what point could we democratically all agree we think the other side is crazy, and ask to peacefully take our ball and go home?
I gladly suggest donating Texas and Florida as the land of the new territory for the "crazy" for which you speak. Anyone not wanting to be part of there rules can move to the other states, and anyone wanting to be part of it can move in. Just let me move out of Texas before the mad rush
The founder of the idea of "checks and balances" themselves (Montesquieu, Secondat) said it, the Founding Fathers who were influenced by the two (Madison) wanted to charter it (Federalist n. 10), and Hobbes argued for it in Leviathan. The writing has been on the wall for CENTURIES to include The People as its own entity within the ontological power-struggle of American politics - we were just led to forget our own history.
To be honest I don't think that in these past ~250 years we've made that big of a progress in answering those two fundamental questions. I mean, the US Constitution starts with the very rousseau-ist "We the People of the United States", but a major part of the population living in said United States wasn't considered (fully) part of said People until the mid-19th century, some say that even now that process is an ongoing project.
For people who want the constitution changed, thats the dilemma they have to deal with. If they don't have enough support to do it the regular way, then maybe the more silly and extreme solutions aren't justified either.
Even worse, equal representation for each state in the Senate is literally the only part of the constitution that cannot be amended.
So even with overwhelming popular support there is an absolute barrier to reform.
On the less bright side, voter suppression and disenfranchisement can fix them a senate race as well as any other.