It required only a simple majority. I am not proposing a simple majority to amend the constitution.
But if you don’t want to simplify that process, no more griping when SCOTUS hands down a decision you don’t like. Talk about an easy way to amend!!
Of course, the punishments they did use were often pretty harsh.
I’m not sure how you make it easier to amend without eroding state sovereignty. The Constitution functions sort of as a treaty. The vast majority of states have to approve any changes. I guess you could make the House and Senate votes easier, but anything less than a 38-state requirement to ratify the changes would fundamentally change the nature of our federalist state.
I’d rather do the stockade, or get caned, and be free the next day, then to spend years in prison. Or even weeks.
I knew someone who was in prison for just a week. He avoided anything really bad happening to him, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid it for a second week. A caning would be far less awful than some of the things that would have happened had he stayed longer.
Don’t forget, if you’re in the stocks or the pillory, anyone with a grudge can throw rocks at you. The 18th-C LEOs won’t stop them, it’s part of the punishment. You might lose an eye, or even die.
Of course we’d modify that for the modern age.
But ridicule and shame go a long way towards deterring crime. Put people in stockades, but protect them while they are in there. Jeering, okay, throwing things, not okay.
Tangential to the main point of this thread, except in that their disagreement didn’t really have that much to do in a direct way with differences of thought/policy. This just happened to come up on the Jefferson Hour podcast I listened to earlier. Basically, Jefferson was of the opinion that Alexander Hamilton was the devil (if I exaggerate, I do so only slightly) and that he’d come to have too much influence over Washington. Because this couldn’t be because Washington, as near a god made flesh as ever the American republic has had, simply agreed with Hamilton over Jefferson, Jefferson came to the conclusion that Washington was going a bit soft in the head. He made a snide remark in a letter* that referred to this. The letter was never intended for publication, but the recipient admired Jefferson’s turn of phrase, so he made it public. This got back around to Washington, and harmed his friendship with Jefferson in a very serious way.
- I can’t find the damned quote right now. Roughly, it was something about how someone who had been “a Samson in the field and a Solomon in the temple” had had his “hair shorn”. Never referenced Washington directly, but fairly obviously about Washington and Hamilton.
Post 15, please.
Textualism. Original thinking can be considered, but shouldn’t dominate a literal reading in the modern context. It should be a little murky though, and kept that way.
More important than easier amendments would be more turnover in the court by having a fixed length term for the justices and appointing the Chief Justice based on seniority. I’m leery of a simpler amendment process, there have been a lot of dumb amendments proposed.
Why?
Well, I’m thinking of a “Constitutional Convention” as a thing empowered not merely to propose amendments, but (like the first one was, at least after the fact) to scrap the whole Constitution and write a new one. As Jefferson once remarked, you cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket. We wouldn’t want to do that every 5 years, that’s much too much. But, if we did it every 20 years – and if the Convention (unlike the first one) were elected – then every generation would have its chance, several times, to rewrite the American social contract from top to bottom.
No, it doesn’t.
And so much the better.
Not knowing much about the subleties of constitutional law, I once asked a law professor friend to explain the basis of Scalia’s legal reasoning to me. He talked for a few minutes about originalism and textualism and then I asked this follow-up:
Couldn’t two intelligent, principled people read the same law text and interpret it differently? Even if they had a good idea of the original intent?
He thought for a moment and then replied, “Well… Scalia would say no.”
I’ve been rather dubious about these concepts ever since.
The Constitution, like any such worthy of the name, is the Supreme Law of the Land and not a treaty.
The problem is supreme court justices can’t avoid it. Their job is to make decisions. And they don’t get easy decisions. The obvious stuff doesn’t make it to the supreme court. They get the tough calls.
Ask if the President can shut down the New York Times and the answer is obvious: no, because the Constitution protects freedom of the press. But ask if a high school principal can shut down a school newspaper and the answer is: ummmm…maybe? The only thing clear about that question is that there’s no clear answer in the Constitution. So the justices would have to decide and ultimately it’s going to come down to their opinions. Sure they can find precedents and principles that will say the answer is no. But they can also find precedents and principles that will say the answer is yes. Which precedents and principles that feel is more relevant to this case is a matter of opinion.
I did not know this about Dredd Scott. Ignorance fought.
Lets see him vote in favor of overturning the partial birth abortion.
Even the senate has 60%. The constitution is the thing that protects us from tyrannies of the majority. I would be ok with making it eaasier to amend if we hadn’t already had done it 17 times (12 times in the last 100 years).
Regularly scheduled constitutional conventions? Aren’t regularly scheduled elections enough? Are you so convinced that inertia prevents change that you wold grease the skids to changing the greatest bulwark of freedom the world has ever seen?
I stand corrected.
Note that this harm involved a broken dental plate and loosened teeth suffered by a handcuffed prisoner at the hands of a prison guard.
You forgot the word Justice and its accompanying scare quotes.
It’s not a treaty, it just functions like one. If the EU ever forms a single federal state, those documents which are now treaties will be the supreme law of that country as well.
Kudos. I wish more people would accept corrections so readily and pithily! No excuses, not but… but… but.
OK, now that your only argument against originalism has been found to be invalid, do you have a better one? But please, keep in mind that originalism and textualism are not quite the same thing.
At any rate it leaves one dubious about Scalia’s legal intellect.