You’re saying to hypothetically pass an amendment changing the part of the Constitution that says you can’t pass a type of amendment? Sounds to me to show utter disrespect for law.
Then, George Washington became President before securing the all-states unanimity needed to change our national compact under the terms of the Articles of Confederation (the original U.S. Constitution). If a change is sufficiently popular, the wording of laws and constitutions won’t matter.
Nope, it is following the law as laid out in the Constitution.
If there were a constitutional convention, and the whole thing was rewritten, would that provision have to stay in?
If everyone on the Supreme Court thought the way I do, yes. I might not be literalist on the bill of rights, but this has to do with clear structural requirements for government.
However, I think you could legally get away with an amendment abolishing the right of he Supreme Court to make constitutional rulings. Then there would be no one to block an illegal provision taking away the equal power of each state in the Senate.
They have however (last I checked, which was several months ago) backed Biden on every federal justice appointment vote that was close, including multiple party line votes where a bare majority mattered. That’s a long-term gain you’d be throwing away by expelling them. Or to put it another way, they aren’t purely obstructionist - sometimes they do back the party line. It’s just that they don’t do so consistently.
You forgot religion, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something too, so can’t this be better summed up in one amendment?
“The rights of citizens of the United States, having attained the age of 18, to enter into a state of marriage with one other consenting person having attained the age of 18, shall not be abridged.”
So, if you were on SCOTUS, you would ignore the current Constitution in favor of a previous version? Would you also still be enforcing the fugitive slave act?
The chances of such an amendment being passed and ratified by 3/4’s states is nill, but, in the hypothetical scenario where it is passed, SCOTUS would be blatantly ignoring the text of the constitution if they thought as you do.
If there was a clear provision in the Constitution that I had to send back slaves to their masters, I wouldn’t join the court. Or maybe I would, but be, in one respect, a lawless judge. There is no similarity between Rhode Island having the same senatorial power as Texas, and the fugitive slave act.
P.S. If there still is a U.S. Supreme Court, it sounds like we made amendments but still have the same constitution.
…you are welcome to think absolutely anything you like.
This is binary thinking.
And it isn’t how the world works.
The Democrats didn’t win Georgia with hate and lies.
Lies and hate of your own isn’t the only way to combat lies and hate. In fact, IMHO, it’s absolutely the wrong way to combat lies and hate. You combat it by taking a position of integrity. And committing to what you stand for. Then getting out there and actually fighting for your people.
That’s what won Georgia.
They are smarter.
They have been playing the long game.
The goal was to take control of the judicial branch. Get the judges, you can ban abortion. It’s taken 30 years: but they’ve done it.
This was always the plan.
You don’t accidentally get the majority of the Supreme Court. They’ve now got it locked up until most of us here on these boards are long dead.
They’ve built an industrial-level disinformation regime, that pumps out propaganda by-the-hour that floods every social and news channel. They have corrupted every process, from the courts, to the police, to the healthcare system, to the industrial prison complex…and you have just let them do it.
This isn’t “hitting below the belt.”
They have outsmarted you.
It’s only really been since Trump that most people have started to realize what has been happening. But marginalised folks have been calling this out for decades.
And the thing is: most of the Democrats with power still can’t see what is happening. They continue to be outsmarted. The abortion story has been hijacked by the “protest narrative” and many Democrats are falling all over themselves to get on the wrong side of that one. The White House even released a statement that fell in line with that narrative. They are even rushing through legislation to protect judges because of this. Because of a handful of Milquetoast protests.
Outsmarted.
I mean, have you even heard about Project Blitz? The party fighting for “States Rights” is also copying and pasting legistlation from a Christian Right Bill Mill. This is at the industrial level. They are just churning it out. The Democrats don’t have anything close to this. Instead, they are probably still just focus-testing to find out what policies would appeal most to their “base.” It’s a strategy based on trying to figure out what their base wants them to do and going with what “they feel is right”, rather than just doing what their base elected them to do.
People are being distracted by the clowns. But the clowns are easily disposable, and the clowns are not the ones with the power.
You are where you are at right now because you’ve been outsmarted. There are less of them than you, yet they have nearly all the power. In the middle of a global pandemic that has killed and maimed millions of people, you can’t even get funding for Covid relief funding approved.
You are out gunned, outflanked, outsmarted, and are quickly running out of time to do anything about it. They are cheating. They are lying. They are manipulating the system. They are in the process of systematically removing people where they can that certified Biden at the last election. And the reason they are doing this is out there in plain sight. They aren’t even hiding it.
You aren’t going to hold the House and win the Senate by pretending that none of this is happening. You aren’t going to hold the House and win the Senate by thinking that a single issue (like “starting the process of constitutional amendments”) will make any significant difference.
The only way that I can see the Democrats holding the line at both the mid-terms and the next election is to roll up their sleeves, hitting the streets, and fighting for every single vote they can get. Because nobody is coming to save you.
I wouldn’t say “smarter”, but rather playing an entirely different game. The Democrats are playing the game under the tacit assumption that you win some, you lose some, important things will be bipartisan, and the balance will be more or less maintained as it has been. That’s the way the Republicans had played for years as well.
The Republicans are aiming for dominance. They’re not looking at this as a game where there’s a status quo that is about 50/50 in Congress and the Supreme Court, and that the Presidency switches every eight to 12 years. They’re looking at it as a game with an end state where the country is like Texas; a Republican supermajority with things gerrymandered such that it is structurally locked in. And they’ve been playing a very long game, although I suspect the majority of what’s happened socially has been lucky coincidence, not Republican machinations, that they’ve been happy to take advantage of. I mean, they couldn’t have predicted the technological advances and social consequences, but they sure were ready to take advantage. Again, they’re playing a different game.
It seems to me that the Democrats are slow in recognizing this- they’re still carrying on like it was 1983 and the parties were still in the win some/lose some mindset, with the expectation that they’ll get their chance again in a few years, no worries.
Personally, I think what they’re going to need to do to remedy/resist this is to devise a coherent platform, enforce that platform’s messaging at all levels, and seriously curb infighting and rogue elements. Having freshman representatives drive/muddle the party’s messaging and debate is insane. It gives ammunition to the opposition, and it confuses what the party’s about. I mean if something like the Green New Deal is going to be up for debate, it needs to go through internal party channels and be official and announced as such, not just thrown out there on twitter. And we need to have the other state/local Democrats singing from the same hymnal as well. This scattered, confused, undisiciplined everybody-does-their-own-thing business has to go. It’s probably the largest thing hurting the Democratic party’s perception- they look like nobody’s driving the boat when you have Biden saying one thing, Bernie saying another, and AOC saying 3 or 4 more that don’t line up with either of them. And when they can’t get their OWN marquee bill passed because of party holdouts, it looks ineffectual and weak as well. All of this actually matters to the undecided voters; clearly the parties’ ideologies and attitudes do not, so it’s all stuff like who looks more effective, or who seems to have a better overall plan. And both of those are seriously hindered by being scattered and not being aligned and disiciplined.
I agree with folks who say that representation is too disproportionate in this country for any of these to pass, barring a chaotic event like another Civil War.
But there is value in having these teed up and ready to go. Democrats could point to documents and say “here’s exactly what we’re going to do, and here’s exactly how many of us you need to elect.” I don’t think Democrats really have that kind of narrative right now.
Another amendment I’d add: SCOTUS reform. Term limits for federal justices, say 12 years. Expand the court and have cases decided by a randomly drawn bench (let’s say 7 out of a possible 49).
I see you have some very strong opinions on this, and that there is unlikely to be any sort of actual fact or logic based discussion going forward.
Be well.
Except that both of them are in the constitution. One of them was removed by the amendment process. What you seem to be saying is that if the amendment process was used to remove the other, you would not respect that.
The point of amendments are to change the constitution.
…it really doesn’t matter what you call it. I think they are smarter. I also think they are playing an entirely different game. They are running circles around you. That what really matters.
I mean…sure. Do that. Mid-terms are in November. All the time in the world to stop the infighting and rogue elements. Come up with a coherent platform tomorrow. Set up industrial-level infrastructure to ensure you can enforce that platform by the end of the week. I can see that working. You will get AOC and Manchin singing from the same songbook, no problems at all.
Right now there is a primary in Texas to unseat Henry Cuellar. Cuellar is anti-abortion: the last anti-abortion candidate in House, and he has Pelosi’s backing. He voted with the Republicans in favour of Hyde. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood. He’s also running for his 10th term.
Oh: and the FBI raided his house in January.
Up against him is Jessica Cisneros. She is strongly pro-choice, is a young civil rights attorney, and came close enough in the March primary to force another vote. She is backed by Warren.
So in the interest of solidarity, of maintaining a “coherent platform”, who do you think the Democrats in that district should rally behind?
I personally think that the people should vote for whomever they think would represent them the best. I don’t think fighting right now is a bad thing. I think that whomever wins should dictate the strategy to win the district, and everyone should do everything within their power to bring about a victory after that. But I don’t see disagreement right now to be a bad thing at all.
What do you think? Should pro-choice people fall in line with Pelosi and the party line and vote for the incumbent? And the person most (probably) likely to win the seat? Or should they vote for the person that they think would best represent them, then fight like hell to get them elected?
But that’s the gamble, right? That this actually matters to the undecided voters?
I think the undecided voters in Manchin’s district are thinking about very different things to those in AOC’s district. I think that asking either Manchin or AOC to stop fighting for the interests of the people that they represent and fall in line with the platform is something that isn’t going to happen. And if they did: then it isn’t the undecided that you have to worry about: it’s the base.
In a perfect world I would agree. The Democrats should have a coherent platform. They should enforce that platform’s messaging at all levels. This is the thing they should be doing. And that’s what I mean when I talked about “cleaning house.”
But I think that it is too late. For the mid-terms at least. It isn’t something you can do in less than a year. Not from where you are…not with what you’ve got. If they start planning for it now then maybe they could be ready by the next presidential elections. Maybe.
Excuse me?
I provided plenty of facts and logic in my post, including multiple citations to back up the statements that I made.
It’s one thing to “agree to disagree.” I would have been good with that. It’s another to insinuate that I didn’t present a factual or logical argument.
Under the U.S. Constituion, it was legal to have an amendment changing the subject-to-multiple-interpretations fugitive slave clause. just as it was legal to have an amendment abolishing slavery.
It isn’t legal to have an amendment taking away the disproportionate senatorial representation of Wyoming and Vermont (unless they agree to it). The idea that you can pass an amendment to allow passing disallowed amendments seems to me a mockery of legality, and I think most others would agree.
Most senates today, such as in Canada, are weak compared to the lowrer house. The founders of the U.S. would have been familiar with the weak Roman senate. So if we, by a legal constituitional change, greatly weakened the U.S. Senate, I might argue that it was still a real senante and, thus, the weakening was legal. But if you get the 38 big population states to take away a senator from each of the remaining twelve, that’s bright line against the rule of law.
As for the thread topic, if that’s how Democrats think, it sounds to me that they like to lose.
If Democrats instead like to win, the priority this year needs to be changing the Electoral Count Act to reduce the chances GOP state legistures can get away with changing the rules after election day 2024.
I don’t live in Cuellar’s district, but I do live in the district just to the east. The problems Cisneros has is that many of the Democrats in that district are Catholic Latinos of an authoritarian mindset who have traditionally voted Democratic due to being pushed away by the Republicans racist platform (and anti-Catholicism in the more distant past). Give them an authoritarian (and in IMHO almost everyone who is anti-abortion qualifies) and that’s who they’ll vote for. It’s just another example of the authoritarian mindset being the big problem.
The constitution says what it takes to amend the constitution, and if you follow that process, then you have legally done so.
In the case that such an amendment were to pass and be ratified, then a very strong majority of the country would disagree with you.
A weaker senate is not a bad thing, when the senate is not representative of the actual people of the country. Having a senate that is not representative of the actual people of the country is a large part of the problem that we are facing, allowing the minority to become a tyranny.
Who said anything anywhere close to that?
Well, it’s not, it was the thought of one specific poster. Extrapolating that into “how Democrats think” would be pretty disingenuous, don’t you think?
Yeah, like that’s going to happen. How many Republicans do you think will sign on to it? Unless you can count ten, then that’s how you like to lose.
…but I think this brings it back to my point.
Which candidate is better for the “platform?”
Bump argues the Democrats should “devise a coherent platform, enforce that platform’s messaging at all levels , and seriously curb infighting and rogue elements.”
How should that play out here?
If what you say is correct, then Cuellar would have a much better chance of winning, then he should be the one that gets backed by the Democrats, and by-and-large that is what is happening.
So does that make Warren a “rouge element?” That people that want to support a pro-choice candidate should sit this one out in the name of solidarity?
I don’t think its fair to ask people to do that. And I don’t actually think that its possible to enforce. I don’t think this is workable. It’s a big tent It’s a two party system…People are going to disagree. You can’t control this. Not in a country where free speech is seen as the bedrock of society.
A strategy that relies on curbing “infighting”, while the party is openly backing anti-abortion supporters, is a strategy that will never, ever work.
Just today the Vice President said “Elect pro-choice leaders at the local, state, and federal level.” Which is at odds with what the Speaker of the House has historically argued and the candidates she currently backs.
Let’s say that in 2010, the Democrats passed a law that said you could not repeal the ACA. Would it be a mockery of the law if the Republicans came along and repealed that law prior to attempting to repeal the ACA?
No.
I think we varying views concerning the difference between a law and a constitution.
More Republican senators were unhappy with 1/6/21 than you think:
I think we can count ten who want the presidential election decided by individually cast votes allocated by electoral college rules.
What ten Republicans won’t agree to is something that throws into the same bill voting rights measures, such as easier registration or voter ID reform.