I agree with the others. You cannot write something that will get rid of court cases and disputes about its meaning. There are debates about statutory construction all of the time.
Your modified First Amendment might get rid of some problems but create many more others. Apart from eliminating church tax exemptions (but do they get exemptions for being non-profit charitable groups or is that “endorsing” religion?) the law is pretty much the same today. What is the point of this new amendment?
Background checks ALREADY EXIST, Firearms purchased at an FFL (including at the “gun shows”) require the filling out of Federal Form 4473 before any purchase, the form is entered into the NICS (National Instant Criminal background check System), and in 15 minutes to an hour depending on backlog), the ATF will return the results;
Pass; background check passed, sale may proceed
Delay; (More info is needed, can take up to 3 days for enhanced check, if after 3 days no results, it is considered a Pass)
Fail; background check failed, sale denied
the only “loophole” is a person-to-person sale and even that has a limitation that both people must live in the same state, and the seller does not suspect the customer is a prohibited person
Mental illnesses, controlled substance use, domestic violence, and violent criminal offenses/felonies are all disqualifying conditions and covered on the 4473, falsifying responses/info on a 4473 is a Federal crime.
there is no “gun show loophole”, that’s misinformation peddled by idiotic politicians and the media.
The Bill of Rights was written specifically because even the authors of the Constitution weren’t quite sure the original document would protect individual rights. I’d be really interested in seeing the “modern, relevant, and less ambiguous” wording that deals with whether taxing religious organizations is or isn’t a tool to drive them out of business.
By the way, the right to abortion (to birth control, for that matter) is due to a rather stretchy interpretation of the 14th Amendment. And up until a Supreme Court decision in 1967, my wife and I couldn’t have gotten married in our home state.
But what’s so great about a parliamentary system. If one side wins, they run everything; if the other side wins, they run everything; and if a third-party gets enough votes you end up with a coalition faster than you can say “Italy.”
There may not be a specific exemption for gun shows. But there is a much broader exemption which applies everywhere, including gun shows. That’s the one you mentioned; person-to-person sales generally don’t have to comply with the regulations that apply to professional sales. So people can sell guns at a gun show by doing so as a private individual rather than as a licensed dealer. And a lot of people are doing this; government reports say that these private sellers make up 25-50% of the sellers at gun shows in states that don’t have a state law prohibiting them.
Yes, and that can be fixed in five minutes by the ATF defining what a "dealer’ is, say by anyone selling more than 12 guns* a year. or 25. or any reasonable number. But they flat out wont.
I think trying to make policy decisions in a new constitution is a mistake. What we most need to decide is how to decide things better. In other words, how do we choose people to best represent us? That’s the area where the current constitution fails us most. Our electoral processes are a mess and perceived to be unfair to many, if not most, voters. You can not manage a country’s affairs effectively if so many don’t think their representation is fair.
I think some of y’all are associating parliamentary systems with multi-party systems a little too much. As I understand it, it’s more a question of the specifics of how members of the legislature are elected (stuff like “first-past-the-post” voting and single-member districts) that produces a two-party system, as opposed to the difference between a presidential system vs. a parliamentary system. Parliamentary systems are not at all incompatible with two-party systems, and historically there have been parliamentary democracies with two-party systems.
Horrible idea, filled with naive notions.
First, there is no way to draft such a document to avoid future litigation. You will leave something out, or the document will be longer than the Bible and the Kama Sutra combined, without all the naked pictures.
Second, and most importantly, attempting to draft a new constitution in the current political atmosphere will end in either civil war or theocracy. Given that choice, I’d prolly have to start singing the songs of angry men…
Also not true, for certain values of “more or less”: Second Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia.
Five decisions in a hundred years, none of which really did anything. Compare to how many 1st Ad dec there have been, literally hundreds if not thousands.
It depends what you mean by a “two-party system”. If you mean a system where there are two major parties and several smaller ones, then yes, that’s part of FPTP in a parliamentary system.
But if by “two-party system” you mean two and only two parties, as is the case in the United States, then no, that’s not found in modern parliamentary democracies. Since World War I in Canada, and before that in the UK, there have been smaller parties as well as the two big ones; and note that the “big ones” can change over time. For example, in Britain, the Liberals were a powerhouse for the latter part of the 19th century, but lost their support after the War. In Canada, in the past 25 years, the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals and the Conservatives have each formed government, while the Bloc Québécois, the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democratic Party have all in turn been the Official Opposition.
And that’s not really unusual in a parliamentary system, where the party system is much more fluid, generally, than the duopoly party system in the United States.
Exactly. If you don’t want court fights about the meaning of a constitutional provision, your new Constitution has to ban judicial review.
Which is not unheard of. France, for example, is clearly a democratic republic, with protections for individual rights, but the scope of judicial review is much more limited and not done through the ordinary courts.
Our current Constitution is deeply flawed because its creators were amateurs who didn’t know what they were doing. But you can hardly blame them for that: They tried their best; there just wasn’t much precedent for what they were trying, so they couldn’t have known how badly they’d botch it.
Nowadays, though, we’ve got people who should know better, but who would set out to deliberately make it ambiguous, vague, and poorly-structured. And a lot of those folks are the ones who would be doing the re-writing.
We could do lot better, but I’m not confident that we would.
np
Amateurs?
Madison has been in Office for over a dozen years. He got advice by mail from Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, and John Adams. Geo Washington Presided. Rutledge has ben in politics for over 20 years. Not to mention Alexander Hamilton ,William Paterson,Edmund Randolph and many other Founding Fathers.
They had seen how the Articles of Confederation didn’t work , and had the Constitutions of several states to base their work on.
Not to mention, many, many nations have based their Constitutions on our 'flawed one". It has worked well for 200 years.
Agreed! I was going to post something like this - the group that met in Philadelphia was one of the most experienced group of people versed in self-government in the western world. They had an impressive mixture of experience in government and detailed research into how governments work and how they fail. Madison and Mason in particular stand out in that regard. They certainly weren’t amateurs.
The track record of other countries based on the US model has not been very impressive. This is one area where commenting on American exceptionalism does have some weight.
Plenty of other nations have used our Constitution as a starting point or inspiration, but then improved on it. That’s the natural way that progression of ideas works. But our Founders didn’t have those other examples to work from.
Look at any modern constitution, and it’ll be very, very different, as a result of all of those incremental improvements and learning from others’ example.
Saying that our Constitution must be the best because so many others are based on it is like saying that the Model T is the best car.
The same with ours, there are a good number of amendments.
and who said “the best”? I mean, there is a huge gap between “the best” and “deeply flawed”.
What is wrong with the Constitution?
Sure, there’s the Electoral college, which would have made a difference in one recent race. That’s bad, but it worked for centuries before.
The Electoral College gave us the presidencies of George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
And Rutherford Hayes was no prize.
My father used to say that the constitution of the Soviet Union was one of the finest guarantees of human freedom in history, until you got to the fine print.
In other words, all power eventually flowed from the Supreme Soviet, which even had the power to veto any attempt to change the law.
But the first 68 sections were a vast improvement over the U.S. Constitution.