The United States constitution as a suicide pact

Great Debates
81

Aside from habeas corpus, another situation that could apply is when a court rules that a government measure widely seen as necessary for public safety is unconstitutional. For a current event example, California’s recent ban on gun possession for individuals with domestic violence restraining orders was just struck down in federal court. One could say, “the constitution isn’t a suicide pact, it doesn’t prevent the States from exercising police powers necessary to protect public safety, and this law is an exercise of such powers.”

In this sense, however, I personally think the Constitution is a suicide pact. I believe so far as legality goes, constitutional protections outweigh practical concerns about public safety. If or when it is necessary to abandon it, it will and should be abandoned - but I won’t condone such abandonment as constitutional, nor as legal under the constitution. I say bad laws can make it legal to set the world on fire, or any number of unconscionable things. I say furthermore that public officers (such as judges) who are sworn to uphold the constitution are bound by their oaths to uphold this suicide pact. In my opinion a judge should issue an highly immoral ruling if it is the legally correct one, or should resign (or recuse). My view is not, as I see it, the predominant one.

(What the Governor of California actually said yesterday was, “Judge Cory Wilson, Judge James Ho, and Judge Edith Jones. These three zealots are hellbent on a deranged vision of guns for all, leaving government powerless to protect its people.”)

~Max

82

Right, the same reason why people comply with a kidnapper’s demands.

And that’s been the playbook of white supremacists ever since. Hold the country hostage to get what they want. They really don’t care if our country survives, they will be happy to rule over the ashes.

In a “it’s the law, therefore it’s correct” way, sure. In a “leads to better outcomes for our country and it’s people” way, that’s debatable. (and in fact, that is the debate.)

83

You seem to be confusing self-preservation with self-interest.
Perhaps I need to expand my reading material, but I’ve never heard the efforts of American Founding Fathers being described as the employing the modus operandi of a kidnapper before.

But always put your money on self-interest. It’s the only horse trying.

84

No, I am saying that it was done for self-preservation. You are the one that is waying it was in self-interest.

If the southern states hadn’t signed onto the Constitution, there would have been no United States, and the fledgling nation would have failed and been quickly recolonized by European powers.

I mean, most of them actually owned people who were forced to obey under pain of torture or death, so it’s rarely needed to point out the obvious. Yes, those who held out on signing the Constitution until certain compromises that secured white supremacist power were acting just as a hostage taker acts. They don’t care about the lives they threaten, and they are even willing to sacrifice their own life, in order to get their demands met.

Self interest will often win against self preservation. I think we found the ultimate flaw not just in our Constitution or government, but the flaw in any form of governance or civilization.

85

No I did not. I was responding to @DeadTreasSecretaries and the claim that “the system is already fundamentally broken,” with “system” in that sentence obviously referring to the overall Constitution as a synecdoche for the American government as a whole.

86

Well I agree with babale that the constitution has always been broken and was built with insurmountable roadblocks to some democratic reforms.

87

I’m old enough that I was in college during the heyday of academic Marxist critiques of capitalism, which often was conflated with democracy. I remember many of the critiques being deep, insightful, and difficult to refute.

And yet they all shared the same flaw. They couldn’t point to a real world example that served people better. They lacked even a theoretical alternative. They were one-sided and ultimately meaningless and forgotten.

Remember the 60s? Riots in the streets. Viet Nam. The Cuban Missile Crisis. Hijacked planes and bombed buildings. The 50s had anti-Communist paranoia at home and the prospect of atomic war. The 40s saw American daily life put into a stasis. The 30s had anti-union wars and the dust bowl. 1929 saw the literal disintegration of capitalism foretelling a decade of horrifying economic disaster and the rise of fascist cults.

Shockingly, people criticized the government’s structure in every one of those decades. What was the result? The country actually improved, in dozens of ways. Nobody who lived through the 30s and 40s thought the 50s and 60s as anything but a huge step up. As somebody who lived through the 60s I can tell you that today’s domestic problems are a pimple by comparison. Our weak, fragile, and fundamentally broken system will overcome and stay the beacon for virtually everybody in the world. I say this as a pessimist, cynic, curmudgeon, realist, and historian. I won’t be around for the whining in the 2030s, so just bookmark this and see what happens.

88

Got it, so none of these points you make are relevant to the point under discussion, right? Since there is a very simple alternative presented here: make representation in the House and Senate proportional to the population of the states they represent. See above:

89

This is vague to the extreme. An alternative to what? There are lots of countries out there that exist in the real world. They have different government structures, and different ways of running their economies.

Amazingly enough, they aren’t all hellholes. There’s even people who enjoy living in them.

And people worked hard to eliminate or mitigate some of the problems they were facing. They were met with resistance, too. Lots of people wanting to maintain the status quo, which was not working out for the American people as a whole.

Right, so why does that stop? Can’t we criticize the government to further improve things, to “step up” more? I don’t think that we’ve reached perfection yet, there is lots of room for improvement.

You had an attempted overthrow of the government by fascists in the 60’s? It’s not just where we are, it’s where we are heading that is of concern.

I’ve never been a big fan of survivor bias. That you survived the last crisis is not a good predictor of who will survive the next.

But in this, I take it you are saying that virtually everybody in the world sees the US as a shining city on a hill? I hate to break it to you, but that’s almost never been true, and is far less true today than it was just a couple decades ago.

I imagine in the next few decades, there will still be people trying to create progress, still be other people trying to drag us back, and still a third cohort of people whining about how people shouldn’t criticize the government because they think they’ve been through worse.

And in those the next decades, America and it influence in the world will continue to decline. But there will still be those who think that it’s the greatest and bestest country that God ever put on this Earth.

90

This is the second time you misread my comment as applying to something completely different. The sentence immediately above mine was this:

Didn’t the word Marxist give a clue? To America as a democratic and capitalistic concept.

91

Okay, let me focus for a moment on the bicameral congress. Originally, the Senate was composed of two individuals per state appointed by their state legislatures. That was amended by the 17th amendment. The House of Representatives originally consisted of one representative for each 30,000 persons but each state is guaranteed one representative. This was changed by the 14th amendment and the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.

Now onto the president, or more accurately, onto the electoral college. As it stood originally, the only people in the country with a vote for the president were those electors chosen in the manner determined by each individual state. Only fairly recently did the Supreme Court decide that electors had to vote the way their state went, thus removing the issue of “faithless electors”.

Senate: orginally–not really democratic but still representative. Now–every voter in the state represented gets to vote for one senator (unless there’s a vacancy) at a time when that senator’s term is due to expire, so I’ll say that’s democratic and representative.

House of Representatives: originally–democratic and representative. Now–each voter in the state gets to vote for one representative in the voter’s congressional district, so theoretically democratic and representative, but gerrymandering comes into play diminising both aspects.

President & Vice-president (Electoral College): originally an unworkable situation with the VP being the runner-up in the presidential election. Now, a system that does not always reflect the choice of the majority of voters nation-wide.

One may not like some or all of that, but I still do not see how it is a suicide pact. I do see how not limiting the number of representatives in the House could quickly become unwieldy with a body of over 1,000 members going by the latest census.

92

But far from equitable. This fatal flaw means that a (mainly geographic) minority, as little as 30% of the country’s population, will outvote the other 70%.

This means a permanent tyranny of the minority.

93

Well said. I’d fine tune / expand it just a bit …

This means a permanent tyranny of the a particular minority.Which minority will continue to shrink in number and relevance while being guaranteed oversized power forever.

94

I thought you were actually putting that out as a debate point, not using the fact that you knew people who were wrong about something as a cite.

But once again, you are being very vague. I don’t even know what you are trying to mean by “America as a concept”, we are talking about America as a real place inhabited by real people. There are other countries out there that are alternatives to America. Not all of them kneel down to worship at the altar of capitalism as we do. And many of them are quite happy about that.

Since I don’t know these people or what their specific points were, it’s hard to debate what you are putting down as a blanket refutation, as you have taken no actual position here, nor did you respond to any of the points that I made in the post you just replied to.

Marx identified flaws with capitalism, and many of those critiques are extremely valid. His specific solutions were naive at the time, and pretty much unworkable in modern times, but the critiques are still valid. Other countries that have recognized the flaws in capitalism have sought to mitigate the damage done by them. I would consider that to be an alternative, and is in general the sort of thing that is being argued for.

If you are equating people arguing for learning from what other countries are doing to lessen the harms that capitalism with the debates you had with Marxists 60 years ago, then you are entirely missing the point of what people are actually saying, and instead just reverting to a knee jerk reaction to what you remember other people saying long before some of us were even born.

I’m not saying throw out capitalism or democracy. I’m saying recognize the flaws that we have in the way that we have implemented them, and work to ameliorate them. I don’t think that anything that you have said has even addressed that point, much less came anywhere near refuting it.

95

It depends on how literally you are taking the words “suicide pact”. Sure, it doesn’t literally mean that we have chosen to mutually kill ourselves. But it does mean that there are flaws that are baked in, that the majority of the people would like to address, but by the nature of the Constitution, they cannot.

One side says, “Here’s a problem that we should look to fix.” The other side says, “The Constitution declares that that problem cannot be fixed. Love it or leave it!”

I don’t see how it would be unwieldy. Let’s say we make one rep for every 50,000 residents. That means 7,000 representatives. On the plus side, that means that constituents have an easier time accessing their representative to the federal government. It means that it is harder to lobby and buy legislation, as there are far more people to pay off and corrupt. The downside is that you need a bigger room if you need to assemble them all for some reason.

96

On the subject of the size of the House, it occurs to me one way (not or sure how constitutional it would be—probably not) we could resolve the problem is by simply weighting each representative’s vote according to the number of people in their district.

97

I think that would be worse than, say, 7,000 representatives with 50,000 constituents each, because it would mean that people in dense areas have much less granularity to their representation than people in rural areas. Your NYC representative may be more powerful under this system, but they’re also responsible for many more people and so have less time (and care less) about your particular concerns.

But it would still be lightyears ahead of OUR CURRENT system.

98

If you mean Senator’s vote, then it’s an interesting idea that I’m pretty sure would not be allowed by the Constitution. If you actually mean representatives votes, they already do represent pretty close to equal numbers of residents.

99

By “pretty close”, I assume you mean, a Wisconsinite’s votes only counts for 2-3 times a Californian’s, as opposed to 70 times more?

100

How did you get that number?

Wisconsin has 8 reps for 5.89 million residents, making it 1 rep for every 737,000 residents

California has 52 reps for 39.24 millions residents, making it 1 rep for every 754,000 residents.

Those aren’t exactly equal, but they are fairly close. Much closer than your figure of 2-3 times.

Every rep represents around 750,000 residents, give or take a bit for rounding errors.