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[Sheb]

What crises? Everything is working fine, apart from the 2nd amendment maybe.

[Rolan7]

Nah, the Tea Party does actually have a point here- the feds have a significantly larger amount of power than the framers ever intended them to have. The only issue is that if you turn back the clock to the 1920s when they were reined in as intended, you also have to tear down the entire edifice of the 20th-century regulatory-and-welfare state, which would be an utter disaster. So pretty much everyone either a) ignores the actual Constitution because it's the only pragmatic option, or b) wants to dismantle everything the Constitution doesn't let the feds do, and doesn't care that it'll be a catastrophe.

It's high time for another Constitutional Convention, in my opinion. Jefferson was on to something- every 19 years is too often for a rewrite, but running a 21st-century superpower on an 18th-century legal document with a few edits over the years invites crises that can't easily be fixed.

Yeaah you're totally right that the Federal government has assumed power from the states, and that does run counter to the original intent.

The world's different though.  In my opinion we desperately need the collective strength of a united America to combat problems like climate change, and to promote equal rights for all people.  More than ever.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I can't say I support a new Convention. If the Right gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with Christian nationalist bullshit, and if the Left gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with trendy SJW bullshit. Either way a bunch of neoliberal corporate bullshit is sure to make it in. There's just not a trustworthy enough political class to make large changes to the Constitution a good thing.

[FearfulJesuit]

@Rolan7: Right.

We haven't seen a real crisis yet, but we've had some near misses, such as the debt ceiling.

Plus, we just know more about how to run a government than we did in the 18th century. The Constitution is a beautiful document, and it works amazingly well given that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to write anything like it. But the Framers never dealt with problems like gerrymandering, or government shutdown, or the proper role of Federal regulation, or whackos with machine guns shooting up elementary schools, so we end up either making pragmatic stabs in the dark or ignore the problem. And sometimes the solutions we come up with are very crisis-prone even if they haven't caused a crisis yet. Obama's been pretty good at using executive orders to create reasonable solutions to real problems, but he (and most of his immediate predecessors, in fairness) is also setting a dangerously abuseable precedent.

@MSH, well, last go-round the Southern planter class stuck in a bunch of really awful things that didn't get resolved for 70 years. Maybe you could just have every single article of the new constitution put up to popular vote?

[Morrigi]

I can't say I support a new Convention. If the Right gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with Christian nationalist bullshit, and if the Left gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with trendy SJW bullshit. Either way a bunch of neoliberal corporate bullshit is sure to make it in. There's just not a trustworthy enough political class to make large changes to the Constitution a good thing.

Agreed, and the authoritarians on both sides would have a field day.

What crises? Everything is working fine, apart from the 2nd amendment maybe.

Homicide rate is still steadily dropping.

[inteuniso]

I can't say I support a new Convention. If the Right gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with Christian nationalist bullshit, and if the Left gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with trendy SJW bullshit. Either way a bunch of neoliberal corporate bullshit is sure to make it in. There's just not a trustworthy enough political class to make large changes to the Constitution a good thing.

This. A majority of problems are simply millenia/centuries/decades/years old problems coming into the roost. The vultures' roost.

Relegalize hemp, start making concrete + plastics out of it or mix it with graphite to make super-ultra-high grade graphene, grow food crops everywhere we're not growing hemp (grow everything naturally/permaculturally/zero-till method: plant it, harvest it, let it regrow, repeat across the seasons) use the excess fruits + vegetable to make alcohol and use that to power our infrastructure (alcohol burns cleaner than gasoline and it's higher octane anyway); have time to worry about literally everything else seeing as we're not hungry and in no danger of running out of power in the next few existences.

[Sheb]

What crises? Everything is working fine, apart from the 2nd amendment maybe.

Homicide rate is still steadily dropping.

Yeah, crisis is probably not he right word. I still think the legality of guns should be something that is decided by democratic will, not set in stone, but hey, I don't live in the US.

[misko27]

I can't say I support a new Convention. If the Right gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with Christian nationalist bullshit, and if the Left gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with trendy SJW bullshit. Either way a bunch of neoliberal corporate bullshit is sure to make it in. There's just not a trustworthy enough political class to make large changes to the Constitution a good thing.

Precisely my opinion. I love altering time-old documents to fit the circumstances as much as the next guy, but when you consider that *someone* will have to actually rewrite it. The benefit of having an old constitution is precisely that it offers some sense of refuge from the vagaries of the present.

Plus, can you imagine the shit storm? The very changing of the constitution will outrage some, the process of deciding who changes will outrage others, and anyone not happy with the final outcome will hold to the *true* Constitution. It's just an invitation for political instablity on a massive scale, of the sort that in other countries provokes civil wars, and at the minimum would basically be the only topic of discussion for a decade or more.

[Morrigi]

What crises? Everything is working fine, apart from the 2nd amendment maybe.

Homicide rate is still steadily dropping.

Yeah, crisis is probably not he right word. I still think the legality of guns should be something that is decided by democratic will, not set in stone, but hey, I don't live in the US.

There is enough democratic will to incite armed uprisings in defense of the legality of guns, which means that the system is working as intended.

[Strife26]

A few of those are pretty reasonable things, but as a whole it's definitely constitutional convention territory, which is something I'd certainly say isn't justified.


In particular, I'd very much like to see a the Federal power to abuse the fuck out of the Commerce clause slapped down hard.

I was actually strongly consider a thread discussing single ammendments to the Constitution. I think that I'll go start it up

[MetalSlimeHunt]

We had a thread at one point dedicated to re-writing the constitution.

[TheBiggerFish]

But not to 'One Amendment'.  That's a different concept.

And it is probably dead if I have not yet seen it ever...

[Powder Miner]

Actually, while I'm not normally for expansion of government power, the simple fact is that expansion that isn't forbidden by the constitution IS allowed by the elastic clause, which lets the govt do what is "necessary and proper", among a few other things. This was a debate among the framers that was very much active at the time, and those who wanted the government to be able to expand (Hamilton) won. There are times where one can argue the Founders would be disgusted, but not being able to expand beyond the DIRECTLY delegated powers? Only some of the founders wanted that, and they lost. It was the defining feature of the political environment of the first presidents.

I will agree with Strife that the Commerce Clause in particular is especially abused.

[IronyOwl]

I can't say I support a new Convention. If the Right gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with Christian nationalist bullshit, and if the Left gets the upper hand they'll stuff it with trendy SJW bullshit. Either way a bunch of neoliberal corporate bullshit is sure to make it in. There's just not a trustworthy enough political class to make large changes to the Constitution a good thing.

This. A majority of problems are simply millenia/centuries/decades/years old problems coming into the roost. The vultures' roost.

Precisely my opinion. I love altering time-old documents to fit the circumstances as much as the next guy, but when you consider that *someone* will have to actually rewrite it. The benefit of having an old constitution is precisely that it offers some sense of refuge from the vagaries of the present.

Plus, can you imagine the shit storm? The very changing of the constitution will outrage some, the process of deciding who changes will outrage others, and anyone not happy with the final outcome will hold to the *true* Constitution. It's just an invitation for political instablity on a massive scale, of the sort that in other countries provokes civil wars, and at the minimum would basically be the only topic of discussion for a decade or more.

So I totally get all this, but again: It's not like the current constitution was written and interpreted exclusively by well-meaning, well-educated intellectuals with a firm scientific basis to work on. I have no illusions that a new constitution would be perfect, but I'm dubious that it'd end up worse than the current one unless we let the process get totally out of hand.

That said, it is true that writing the damn thing is only Step 1. The current constitution is not a result of George Washington writing some gospel everyone has faithfully followed for 200 years, and a rewrite of the constitution would suffer from similar issues where a bunch of things get challenged, ignored, changed, and interpreted. That'd add an extra layer of practicality, corruption, and dilution to whatever was attempting to be accomplished.

[TheBiggerFish]

We should try to write a constitution by science....