You guys are pretty much on your own when it comes to holding that there is a right to guns.
This are my feelings on it also. We would never agree on a new constitution, and the one we have even if outdated at least has the basics right.
This. And I wish they were used more instead of trying to twist and turn the original words into meaning what we want in order to make them constitutional.
Social Security, Medicare, internal improvements, civil rights laws, and the like would all pass with comfortable margins. I wish we would have amendments for those instead of perverting the older words to mean what they don’t.
But, the document works perfectly otherwise. Write things in big and broad strokes with a method to change if something becomes outdated or irrelevant, but it does NOT change merely for the cause du jour.
FWIW, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in order to make civil rights laws constitutional.
As for internal improvements, politicians have been arguing about that one virtually since 1789. It’s a nice reminder that even the framers of the document didn’t agree on its meaning.
Oh, now THAT would be fun. Can you imagine today’s government trying to write a new Constitution? They can’t even agree on which way to hang the toilet paper! 
Not according to the Supreme Court less than 20 years after its passage. Civil Rights Cases - Wikipedia
But even Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and those others that didn’t think the Constitution allowed them said, “We like the idea. Let’s pass an amendment to be sure.”
It’s even more complicated than that, but in any case, the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t change the fact that Congress tried to amend the Constitution for that purpose. It’s just that, according to the 1883 Supreme Court, they failed.
It’s not a terrible constitution, but it’s not state-of-the-art. The Electoral College in particular is a clunky relic.
But it would definitely be a Bad Idea to write a new one. First of all, if you think special interest groups and big insdustries have too much influence on Congress now, think how much lobbying money would be poured into a constitutional congress. And the two parties would never, ever be able to agree on anything substantive. And whatever document was produced, people would bitch about endlessly. Most people are pretty happy with the one we have.
That may be so, but it’s a right that’s recognized here, that isn’t recognized there.
If the English recognized the right to pastries, and we didn’t, that would be a right English had we didn’t. Whether or not both parties agree it’s a right is irrelevant… actually, that’s not true, it’s perfectly relevant, it’s the heart of the issue.
However, freedom of speech protections are – unarguably – greater in the US than England, Germany, France, China, Russia, Japan, etc. I don’t know about Canada, I think they’re probably just like us, but colder, for the most part.
Nitpick: Species. Singular and plural forms are identical, like “moose.”
Well . . . Jefferson went ahead with the Louisiana Purchase despite his doubts the Constitution authorized it, just because it was too good a deal to pass up.
Oh, don’t go there! The Bible has been re-translated, several times, into more modern English. But the intent there was always to better convey the original meaning to readers, not in any way to revise it.
The corresponding status of the Constitution as kind a unalterable Scripture, requiring the kind of nuanced interpretation with which Christian theologians have wrestled for centuries, has on balance not been a good thing for America.
Based on the commentary so far in this thread, I think overall for the United States it is a good thing that they have such an old Constitution, and things would be a lot less stable otherwise. There is one disadvantage that I can see, and that is it doesn’t necessarily reflect modern values. The South African Constitution, that came into effect in 1997, includes sexual orientation as a protected class, meaning the Constitutional Court had solid grounds for ruling that marriage had to include same-sex couples. That just isn’t going to happen in a document from 1787 and as much as I would like to see same-sex marriage introduced it doesn’t seem like that would be a valid interpretation.
Of course, it is probably a moot point, since it isn’t clear that such language would make it into a 2010 United States Constitution either - but there was zero chance in 1787.
As with a great many other things, we can legalize same-sex marriage without deeming it a constitutional right. IMO, Americans in our political discourse have placed entirely too much emphasis on the idea of constitutional rights; it would be better, if you’re trying to get something changed, to focus on changing the public consensus for purposes of winning victories in the ordinary political-legislative arena.
I’ve often seen elaborate arguments where people think we need a dramatic overhaul of our government. Some argue that we need a parliamentary style system like the U.K. has. I’ve seen strong arguments for separating head of state/ head of government to do away with the “imperial nature” of the Presidency. I’ve seen arguments for proportional representation and throwing out first past the post (because it is assumed, at least by supporters of such a thing, that more than two parties is intrinsically superior and guarantees more viewpoints are represented.)
The truth of the matter is, there isn’t a perfect form of representative government. Different realities in geography, history and culture create very different states that probably need very different frameworks for running a government.
As an earlier poster made mention of a constitution as an “operating system”, I’ll extend that analogy by pointing out that OSes are not one size fits all. While they all have their die hards, most people recognize different things need different OSes. It’d be stupid to try and run full fledged Windows 7 on a mobile device, and it’d be stupid to try to run a full fledged workstation with Palm’s webOS. Linux makes sense for some PC users, while Windows makes sense for others.
A country like Singapore which is very small and very homogeneous probably does not need the same sort of government as a country like Germany, which only in the past 150 years actually existed as a unified state. For over a thousand years the region of Europe populated by German-speaking peoples was a mass of hundreds of independent and quasi-independent states. Crafting a government in 1871 when the majority of traditional “Germany” was united under the Hohenzollern crown required a very different touch than what you would expect say, from a new French constitution drafted around the same time period.
Certainly some governments are structured in a way that is not desirable, for example most historians view the actual political structure of the Weimar Republic as a big part of why it became a failed state. While crushing economic depression, the consequences of losing World War I, and a disaffected and angry population obviously were the heart of the engine of chaos, the poor design of the Weimar Republic’s governing framework made things a lot easier for the Nazis than it would have been in other countries.
In reality I think the best way to analyze the effectiveness of a political framework is looking at the results.
Look at the U.K., it’s an ancient country with a hodge podge of laws, outdated customs, offices that make no sense, a hereditary monarch as Head of State, no clearly delineated and written governing framework, and basically all kinds of other stuff that make it a real mess.
However, the simple truth of the matter is, it works. The UK has been the most stable and prosperous country in Europe for centuries, it’s one of the most economically and technologically advanced countries in the world. It has a very high standard of living, very healthy population, little-to-no extreme poverty (I use the word extreme poverty to indicate people starving to death on the streets, something that, despite all the hyperbole, is mostly unheard of in any part of the first world.) It also has one of the most powerful military forces on the planet.
If you look at the government of France, it’s very different. Very different structure, France has had entire “reboots” of its governing framework many many times in the past two hundred years. It’s probably the case that a lot of the experimenting that France engaged in since the revolution didn’t end well. However, despite being very different from the UK, France’s government works for it, too. France has a GDP of over $2 trillion, it has one of the healthiest populations in the world, one of the highest standards of living, a strong military, etc etc.
The same stuff can be said for the United States; the same stuff sans powerful military can be said for countries like Norway, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark (the list goes on and on.) While every “first world” country has systemic problems, poor design flaws in their government, social problems, political problems and et cetera, that’s just the reality of human societies. No perfect “operating system” creates a utopia.
While you can quibble about the specifics of the governing framework all you want, the truth of the matter is the framework of most first world countries is pretty damn good by the only real measurable metric: the strength and prosperity of the country itself.
And I would say that the ratio of extreme wealth to extreme poverty in the United States is a little more clear cut these days than some of the countries that you listed. There are countries on that list where there are no homeless. Compared to them, our country is beginning to suck on that “real measurable metric.”
Returning to the subject of the Constitution:
Except the one that guarantees equal rights based on one’s gender.
That’s not the only real metric for a country. It might be the only metric you use, but for me it’s not.
I would prefer to live in a country like the United States, with a chance of homelessness and poverty, than a country where I was 100% certain I’d never have homelessness or poverty, but couldn’t speak out against the government, or do marry the woman I want because she’s in a different caste of society.
There isn’t a country that accurately contrasts with the US, for the purpose of my analogy, but my analogy does show that there are a number of other metrics which yours fails to account for.
Freedom – and not in the “freedom to fail,” republican/democrat ideological divide – is a metric which isn’t easily measured, but is certainly important.
The reason that the Equal Rights Amendment keeps failing is that there are real biological differences between the genders that make completely equal rights impossible. Now, equal rights are possible and desirable in most cases, but it’s always framed as an all-or-nothing proposition.
WTF?! Certainly there are real biological differences between the genders that arguably make completely identical social roles for them impossible, or undesirable; but that does not mean completely equal justiciable rights as between the sexes are impossible or undesirable.
This is a really weird post, Chronos. Can you elaborate? Who is saying, “we want to pass an equal Rights amendment, we really do, but those damn biological differences keep railroading us”? And also, can you spell out which biological differences you’re referring to, and be specific?