The First Amendment have never been read to permit speech such as obscenity, libel, threats, fighting words, etc. This is a good reason why things are not read hyper-literally. Does “Freedom of the Press” mean that a newspaperman can drive drunk to his next scoop? Of course not.
I’m not sure what you mean by your dispute with the Tenth. The People, large P, only have political power through elected representatives which would either be State or National officials. If the National government does not have the power, the Tenth reserves it to the states. Where the States also have no power to act (such as passing a bill of attainder or an ex post facto law) such things return to the people who had ultimate power to begin with. (But, again, have no power to enact them under the current constitution).
Insofar as the Tenth Amendment “tak[es] away” power of the people, that what every portion of a constitution does. What if the people want to make the voting age 19? They cannot do it because of the 26th amendment. That is not a reason for repeal.
On the contrary, this election cycle’s showing that there has not been enough representation of the popular will and interest. In that vein, the provisions of the Constitution (not necessarily the amendments) that need to be repealed are the archaic provisions that were instituted by men (who for all their virtues) essentially foresaw the American Republic as an Anglo-Saxon, agrarian, Protestant commonwealth to be ruled by an elite mercantile-planter class. Since none of this is the case now, we should think of at the very least abolishing the Electoral College, reducing the powers of the Senate (make it more like the German or Canadian upper houses) or abolishing it, establishing a system of PR for Congress, and allowing for constitutional amendments to be ratified by supermajorities in national referendums.
I don’t see why one necessarily follows the other. Getting rid of the EC and the Senate is an exercise in serious brain damage. Democracy is just mob rule, and is mentioned nowhere in the DOI nor BOR or constitution, they set up the government to have some democratic principles but generally speaking the idea was to preclude democracy or at least limit the “passions” of the electorate to the House.
Of course the electoral college was a compromise, otherwise the small states would never have agreed to enter the union in the first place. The separation of powers was an excellent idea and anything done as a workaround on that has proved to be a mistake in my view.
We discussed this in another thread a couple of years ago, but the consensus was that conviction of a crime would not allow a person to be sold into chattel slavery. It simply means that prison labor is permitted.
Why is it “serious brain damage” just because it goes against the intentions of the Founding Fathers? As I’ve said, they were great men but they were also (like everyone else) fundamentally driven by self-interest as wealthy merchants, lawyers, and/or landowners which led them to be suspicious of the common people. Representative liberal democracy where basic rights would be guaranteed is hardly “mob rule” and it’s not as if rule by the elites were any better. Consider that the most oligarchic states in the Union were in the Deep South where for a century after the War of the Rebellion, suppressed both black and poor white voters. Instead of these states being the shining stars of the Republic, they are instead almost universally the poorest and most backward of those in the Union.
It may have been a necessary compromise in 1787 to secure the union of the 13 former colonies but not anymore. It’s not as if Wyoming and Vermont are going to secede over this.
They don’t need to secede: they, along with the other small states, have the power to block any proposed constitutional amendment which reduces their influence, such as eliminating the Electoral College.
