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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

OK but the constitution effectively cannot be amended now (the last one, in the early 90s, took 202 years to pass [no not a typo]) and we're stuck with what we have. The population also isn't even remotely good with the powers restrained by the 10th amendment and hasn't been since at least the 1930s and maybe even before that, and there is zero chance the court changes that.

So what is next. It seems the only option is to just use the courts to re-interpret the constitution, so that things like growing your own wheat is "interstate commerce" and so that stuff like a post-86 machinegun isn't an arm even within the context of being a member of (by federal statute) the unorganized militia.

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Repeal the 17th amendment - popular election of senators - and all of a sudden it gets much easier for states to amend the Constitution in ways they want.

Popular election of senators has been a disaster, it essentially turned to the Senate from a deliberative body into a pure partisan body like the House.

Lack of elections hasn't seemed to save your supreme court from becoming a pure partisan body.

Yeah, I think the people need a way to eject people without waiting for 2-6 years (or never for the supreme court). it needs to be a high bar, but if we use the same 75% state ratification to start up an impeachment process, it might keep some pressure under people who otherwise feel like they can run rampant.

It did. An average of 48 percent of Supreme Court rulings from 2010 to 2018 were unanimous. Another eight percent were nearly unanimous. That happens even though justices were appointed by different parties and the issues under discussion are normally complex and contentious. Clearly they can't be a partisan body if they so regularly agree despite having different politics.

But it's not clear how long that can be sustained now. The recent appointment of KBJ takes it in that direction. She has stated in court opinions that are themselves clearly unconstitutional, like:

"Having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.Ds and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States… These issues should not be in presidential control."

A SCOTUS judge should not be concerned with the "best interest of the citizens". That's not her job, that's the job of politicians. Making decisions on such a basis renders SCOTUS merely another House, but one that considers itself above the others in the power rankings. And what she's asserting is that the President should have no power over the executive branch, which is what Democrats want but isn't what the constitution says.

Do you feel like there have been any significant changes to the political landscape in the 8 years since?

Not really. SCOTUS is mostly the same people. Eight years ago was 2018, people were whipping themselves into a frenzy about Trump, not much different to today.

There are many systems, the Australian Federation of independent States adopted a "Washminster" system based on both the UK Westminster system and the USofA Washington system.

Popular election of senators in the senate / upper house hasn't been a disaster there.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Senate

Australia also has political weightings wrt various regions populations.

The Australian Electoral Commision as an independent body does a lot of heavy lifting towards keeping the washminster system running (no gerrymandering and a world class voting system).

Independent checks and balances are an essential part of any system of government.

The people vote in Representatives to debate policy, an independent merit based civil service carries it out, overwatched by independent scrutineers, judged by and independent legal system and enforce by a spectrum of LEOs and peace officers.

A feature of the Australian system (IMHO) is how rapid the churn on Prime Ministers can be ... the Washington system by contrast can't even toss out a corrupt felon grifting hard in public view.

The AEC did nothing to stop the Australian government trying to criminalize the views of its political opponents, so it's not doing all that much heavy lifting.

Specificity helps here; which government and which political opponents?

eg: Do you refer to the government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and its clandestine actions wrt organisers of the Vietnam moratorium protests?

* https://mhnsw.au/whats-on/exhibitions/persons-interest-asio-... etc.

I don't think that solves what I see as the root problem, the national parties' control of the state organizations. The money would only need to be focused on the state politicians instead of them plus the senators.

This argument has always seemed odd to me. The 17th amendment first took effect in 1915, and the whole Senate had been directly elected by 1919. Are we really going to claim that the late 1910's are when things really went off the rails? For example, to your specific point here, it seems unlikely that this made amending the Constitution harder. Excluding the Bill of Rights and the 27th Amendment (each a special case for its own reason), there have actually been more amendments in the fewer years after the 17th was enacted.

It's also unclear why one would expect that the Senate would be less partisan if its membership were selected by state legislatures. State legislators have a lot more partisan loyalty than the rest of us, both because they tend to be more ideological and because they are deeply dependent on the party for future career prospects.

Which is something people arguing to make the house of Lords fully democratic don't appreciate.

Senators aren’t hereditary and never were; they used to serve at the will of elected officials but were isolated from electoral influences.

Holy shit, imagine of the whole of federal congress could be controlled with gerrymandering rather than just the house: the house through districts, and the senate through districts for state representatives. The fireworks would be insane.

Put another way: it would do nothing. If it did something, it would likely make everything worse, not better. Legislatures would pick the most partisan hack. They would be answerable to fewer, more partisan people. It would pour fire on an already tenuous situation.

It would also make congress significantly less representative of the country, but I guess that's the point.

My understanding is that states already have the ability to appoint presidential electors however they want. No need to repeal any amendment, if a state wanted to do things differently in that regard.

My proposed elector appointment algorithm is as follows. For each elector seat, summon 20 grand juries according to standard methods (distribute across various counties, weighted by population). Each grand jury spends a day getting to know one another, then appoints one member as a representative using approval voting. The 20 representatives from the 20 grand juries form a secondary grand jury, which also spends a day getting to know one another, then appoints one member as a representative using approval voting. This produces 1 elector. Electors serve 8-year terms, staggered so that their appointments occur midway through a presidential term when emotions are relatively placid.

If you persuade a few big swing states to adopt this approach for appointing electors, the nature of the presidential contest changes dramatically.

This is more along the lines of how the presidential elector system was supposed to work in the first place. Presidential electors were supposed to be leading individuals of the community, not otherwise involved in politics, exercising their independent judgement. That's what the founders intended.

Been saying this for almost two decades. State governments no longer have a direct seat and representation at the table. Federal mandates (coercion) like enforce this or don't get funds would never, or at least rarely, happen. It's also the only nonviolent way to dissolve the union, intentionally or through strangulation (state legislatures refusing to elect and seat senators, if a majority of them do this then a quorum can't be reached and funding dies).

> It's also the only nonviolent way to dissolve the union, intentionally or through strangulation (state legislatures refusing to elect and seat senators, if a majority of them do this then a quorum can't be reached and funding dies).

Sounds like a bad idea and far from non-violent

Naw. Bicameralism is dumb.

Abolish the Senate. End our vetocracy. (h/t Francis Fukuyama)

well, I'm never a fan of "this is hard so lets break/bend the rules" as a justification.

The constitution still can be amended. But congress has been in gridlock for 30 years so we can't even get over the first hurdle. Lets work on fixing that gridlock and then we can review if 38 states signing on is too big a burden. It was already a Herculean task convincing 10/13 states to accept the Bill of Rights.

>the last one, in the early 90s, took 202 years to pass [no not a typo]

I mean, it's not a typo, but it's also misleading. It wasn't an active campaign for 202 years. It was largely forgotten for most of that time.

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