I use 50 years here because that’s roughly how long it’s been the 26th Amendment passed, lowering the voting age to 18 (there’s the 27th amendment involving Congressional pay, which became part of the Constitution in 1992, but that was a weird case in that it was first proposed 200 years before, and not enough states ratified it until someone took it up as a personal project in the 1980s).
With the country’s political divisions, amending the Constitution has become damn near impossible, as an amendment would need to be approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. But one idea that might gain enough traction would be to rein in the president’s pardoning power. Lately presidents of both parties have issued unpopular, controversial pardons (Biden pardoning his son and other family members, Trump pardoning the J6ers). I could see significant bipartisan support for an amendment stating that the president can only issue pardons recommended by a special bipartisan pardoning commission; or vice versa in that the president can issue a pardon, but said commission would have to approve it before it goes into effect.
Anyway, do you see this country getting to a point in the next 50 years where enough lawmakers agree on an issue to pass an amendment. And, if so, what do you think that amendment will address.
From where I’m sitting (which is outside of the USA), it looks possible that it might be amended into small pieces by just tearing it up, at some point in the next 3 years, but I concede this might be just because international news will tend to filter the most sensationally egregious violations of your political systems.
The bipartisan pardoning thing sounds pretty sensible, but I wonder whether any party would be interested in seeing it through, when they are holding power.
I have a hard time thinking of any one particular cause or issue that could get so much widespread agreement that you could cross the hurdle of states/legislatures needed to get it ratified. It would require something that gets major support from blue and red voters/states alike. I agree with the OP that the presidential pardon power might be one with enough agreement, but it’s such a relatively small/rarely debated issue that it’s hard to see enough grassroots movement to put it on the ballot. However, if it did get on the ballot, there would be relatively little opposition to it.
Term limits and age limits could pass by the states against the will of Congress, which would be sweet.
Well, the 25th amendments (succession to the presidency, presidential disabilities) was passed pretty quickly after Certain Events drew attention to a potentially serious lacuna in the existing constitutional arrangements.
Certain Events that the country is going through right now might focus minds in a similar way, and lead to bipartisan agreement on necessary or desirable constitutional amendments. Can the President pardon himself? Should Trump -v- United States be reversed or limited? Should the separation of powers be reinforced, to limit the extent to which the executive can usurp the powers of the legislature or flout the rulings of the courts? And no doubt Dopers will be able to think of many other examples. Basically, are there any constitutional conventions which are being flouted today which both parties might agree ought to elevated to the status of explicit constitutional provisions?
Right now, of course, no attempt to defend the Republic from Trump will enjoy bipartisan support. But imagine a hypothetical but not impossible future, in which Trump’s actions have not been restrained; they have proven disastrous for the Republic; the people are dismayed, disgusted and revolted; and the Republican party is in tatters. The Republican party might ask itself “what can we do to make sure we never find ourselves in this situation again?”, and it might be a bit more open-minded to proposals for constitutional reform.
My answer is maybe. There are two separate elements to this.
First: it will never, ever again be amended in the direction of democracy and progress. (Meaning, expanding or federalizing civil rights, reining in the executive, that sort of thing.) Fifty years, five hundred years, doesn’t matter. The country will split up first. This is an absolute certainty.
However: it is far more likely — but by no means guaranteed — that the Constitution will be amended away from democracy and in favor of dictatorship, autocracy, and minority rule. This requires the fascists to continue their red-state gerrymandering project, cementing their control of the current lineup and tipping over a handful of marginal states until they achieve the two-thirds majority that allows them to impose their will. This will be difficult, but not impossible.
They already have a plan for it. See here.
They have a website and everything:
The Rawstory article is from 2022, though this has been in the wind since the mid-2010s. In the past, it has been generally dismissed as unrealistic fringey conspiracy stuff. (Search for “conventionofstates” to see a handful of previous mentions on this board.)
I would no longer be so sanguine about this effort. It’s still a bit of a long shot. But it’s within visible reach.
And a corresponding countereffort, defending democratic principles from these anti-American fuckweasels, is, as I said, an impossible pipe dream.
Yeah. Either it gets amended into something that better supports a right wing dictatorship, it becomes so irrelevant that it never gets amended because nobody pays attention to it anymore, or it gets outright replaced with a new Christofascist version. It’s a tossup which.
How would that amendment be worded without constitutionally enshrining the Republicrat duopoly? (IIRC the constitution and its amendments are written in a way that is agnostic of the number, or even existence, of political parties.)
IMO, once Trump is gone for good, some Republican leader is going to have to give “the secret speech” and denounce his cult of personality, and in its aftermath there’ll be a push to amend the Constitution so that no future president can engage in the kind of arbitrary autocratic rule-by-decree he’s been attempting.
What happens between now and then, however, has the potential to go very badly.
…and then continue the same level of grift, deceit, undermining of democratic norms and institutions, et cetera, just as they have been doing for the last four decades in order to stay in control of Congress, which they have otherwise struggled with since the beginning of WWII. Or are you under the misapprehension that all of this started with The Amazing Trump somehow brainwashing the GOP with his mesmerism act and they are all going to return to some hypothetical state of Nobel Republican once Trump pitches headfirst into a bucket of fried chicken, and even further seek to ensconce into the Constitution protective measures to prevent them from ever retaking power in this way?
Why would there be a backlash? Trump has shown the GOP how to make populist appeal to the masses and return to power despite outward and obviously corruption. Republicans may struggle to find another once-in-a-generation candidate with the right balance of a kind of gross charisma, self-promotion, and lack of introspection of a Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump, but the essential lessons—promise everything, distract from your failures, blame opponents for your failings even if it makes no sense, quash internal dissent and force objectors within the party to comply or be pushed, and never ever ever acknowledge or admit to mistakes—are now locked in the cultural consciousness of the Republican party. Why would they change course, and more to the point, go to the extreme measures of actually passing constitutional amendments that would limit their ability to do so in the future? What would be their motivation, backing, and funding for this?
They’re not paying attention to the Constitutional limits on what the President can and can not do right now, what on Earth makes anyone think that some new amendments are going to change that?
