Bonus points. If you think of something you would add to the new constitution.

top 76 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I don't think that similar mindsets would be a goal. They lived in a world 250 years ago. They owned slaves. They basically owned their wives.

What you need are people who actually draw the right conclusions from the mistakes that have been made on those 250 years.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    The interesting thing is they intended for the Constitution to be updated periodicity To keep up with the times.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    What they couldn't have anticipated is the downward spiral in education.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago

    91.4% of American citizens are better educated than the founding fathers. Yes that includes pretty much all of MAGA.

    About 7.25 billion people are better educated than the median American colonist as of 1776.

    Education has not reduced in any way. In fact thanks to China this is the single most educated period in world history, by such a wide margin no other period can be reasonably compared to today, including the 20th century.

    'So why don't we have blah blah people of higher calibre blah blah classist propaganda blah blah dummies'

    We do have plenty of intelligent people. All of them capable of empathy have either killed themselves or are in STEM and have no interest in politics or commerce. All of them incapable of empathy are the owners of the current Amerisraeli hegemony that rules a large part of the world with indescribable amounts of violence and evil. Because most people have empathy (yes, even the ones you hate), they cannot fathom how people without empathy actually think and behave. Because a lack of empathy is an absolute necessity for success under capitalism, even in politics under capitalism, those without naturally rise to the top.

    Americans especially are taught from a young age to never rebel, to never fight back, to never play dirty, to never try to change the status quo. They are taught this despite being told mythologized stories of the founders of their country doing the opposite. This naturally aligns with empathy, which effectively filters out Americans into those that will succeed in business and politics, and everyone else that will live under them, forever.

    This is the only misstep in education. Not teaching the truth of the 'founding fathers,' and not teaching how and why they succeeded, and how and why revolutions do not ever end. Which to be fair to the last point, it took another 80 years for philosophers to realize that, after the US failed to actually be different than the kingdoms it rebelled against.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 8 points 6 months ago

    None. I don't trust any politicians of this day and age to be honest and responsible enough to do it.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (39 children)

    Drafting a new constitution is fairly unnecessary outside of deposing an aristocracy or a dictatorship. Plus, it only has any effect if everyone agrees on it so you will need literally everyone to have some input and agree or else you will have seperationists.

    I would just add the following and call it good:

    1. No cap on the house of Representatives.

    2. Term limit on EVERY elected individual, cabinet appointee, and judge.

    3. Senate seats proportional to population with the smallest state receiving 1, a state double its size receiving 2, etc.

    4. The President is not immune to indictment and has no authority over the DOJ.

    EDIT:

    \5. Individual campaign funds are capped, organizations funds require signatures and count towards the individual totals, with enforcement of federal prison time on ALL involved in the case of going over. Proven illegal funding can invalidate election results and trigger a new election automatically.

    \6. In the event of an absence a new election must be called immediately, and any attempt to delay the process can be met for prison time.

    \7. Total Bodily Autonomy - doctors are still expected to adhere to strict antinegligience practices and conditions, can choose to decline patients, but if a patient is informed of risks for proven safe procedures then it is their choice to have whatever medical procedure or even cosmetic procedure performed on their body as they wish.

  • source
  • hideshow 39 child comments
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (21 children)

    Number 3 structures the Senate (more or less) the same as the House. The whole point of the Senate is to give each state equal representation, while the House gives each person equal representation.

    If you're going to restructure the Senate that way, may just as well get rid of it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 21 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (19 children)

    The senate was conceived at a time when the most populated states were filled with slaves and disenfranchised poors who couldn't vote. There's no reason to discard a longer-termed gerrymanderjng-immune chamber of Congress just because we want the 70 million Americans in California and Texas to not be subjects of the 1 million in Vermont and Wyoming.

    Stacking the senate to reflect population is fine. Especially if we change the house to only care about voters

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 19 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (16 children)

    The reason they're gerrymander immune is that they only have two reps that aren't up for election at the same time. If you award seats proportionally Californa will have roughly a dozen seats in the Senate. What would be the schedule and process for electing them all? Why not just use that process for a single legislature?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 16 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (15 children)

    CA can have four at-large seats for the whole state up for election every two years.

    They would have the same long-view that existing senators have, and would not be internally less responsive than the current system

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 15 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (14 children)

    That sounds great.
    Just use that in the House.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 14 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (13 children)

    Having all of Congress be at-large would essentially eliminate gerrymandering by just letting any majority in a state decide everything.

    I think thats the single worst change we could make, beating out term limits. Because if only lobbyists and staffers can be long-term careers we'd never have principled professional politicians, just short-term figureheads

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 13 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (12 children)

    What does "be at-large" mean?
    We're talking about a kind of stagered multi-member districts.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 12 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (11 children)

    "At Large" means that the senators would be elected by the whole state, which is the only way to avoid gerrymandering and identical to how the current rules work.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 11 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (10 children)

    It's not the only way. Larger multi-member districts also work.

    And while we're re-writing the whole constitution, we could do lots of things. Like requiring algorithmically generated districts, to remove the possibility of any arbitrary bias.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (9 children)

    Algorithmically generated districts just give a sharper target, and allowing the existing systems to include multi-member districts just makes gerrymanding easier.

    The only way to prevent gerrymandering is with either districts that don't change (statewide), or changing the rules of the legislature so gerrymandering doesnt matter

    My favorite potential fix is direct proxy voting. Tie vote weight in the legislature to how many citizens voted for you, and send either the top N vote-getters or everyone who gets at least X% of the votes cast to the legislature.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (8 children)

    Don't know what you mean by sharper target.

    You can pick a specific algorithm based on nothing but population, without any demographics. Thus impossible to gerrymander. The Shortest Splitline is one. Another I don't remember the name of draws circles around the densest population centers as big as they need to be to include the required number of people.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (7 children)

    Passing government functions off to a computer only encourages corruption and distortion in either the implementation, the input, or how the output is handled.

    It's like trying to engineer anti-cheat on a system where not only does the user own their own hardware but also the marketplace vendors, the courts, the OS vendors, and your servers.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (6 children)

    I think you're thinking of laws.
    Code is better.

    You can't game how many people live where.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    I don't know whether it's cute or terrifying that you think you can solve a political problem with software.

    Humans can and will game how many people are reported as living where. And they'll intentionally misinterpret the algorithm you write. And they'll lie about what your magic box says. And if they're ever caught doing it they can and will be either ignored by the humans who enforce laws or just be given pardons by the governing humans who wanted the system mucked with in the first place

    The only thing in our species' history that has ever served as a check against the selfish creativity and audacity of humans is the selfish creativity and audacity of other humans.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    How do you change peoples addresses; Not just a few, but several percentage points? And people don't interpret anything. That's the point. The data is collected in the census by thousands of people. You can't get thousands of people to lie about tens of thousands of addresses when they don't even know which way to fudge the numbers. Then the computer tells you where the lines are. Nothing for people do to change them. Any attempt to change it will be obvious.

    Did you even look at the site I linked? Because all you have is vague promises that people lie. You offer no alternative. If people can just lie about everything (which even Rump has failed to do) what can laws do? Laws are even easier to lie about.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    There was intentional miscounting in the 2020 census, even though that was only used to determine relative distribution of representatives among the various states. Every politician in the country already has huge lists of where their supporters live, and it is already obvious when they're pulling shenanigans. And yet they do it anyway, because mere shame is not enough to keep humans from being jerks to obtain power and wealth.

    My preferred alternative is not to rely on software or laws, but other humans and a dramatic expansion of whose votes matter in the country from "just those who won" to "essentially everyone.".

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    How much miscounting? Enough to matter? How. If you want to convince the shortest splitline can be manipulated more than a bunch of people, you need to explain exactly how.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not going to get into a pointless argument about whether or not the worst part of your proposal is "people" or "math", since this is a system question and the distinction is irrelevent.

    Humans will attempt to distort whatever system you decide. The only thing that has ever constrained this impulse is other humans with opposing interests. If you do have that what math is actually used becomes irrelevant, and if you don't then the math is just a game that the humans who want to break your system may play or ignore as they choose.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago

    If you're not willing to understand even the basics of what you're talking about enough to explain your view, there isn't anything to talk about. You're just obviously wrong, and you don't even care to know why. I've got nothing more for you.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    Senate, not gerrymandered?

    giving < 1/3rd of the population 2/3rds of the national political power is the most severe representative disenfranchisement there is in the US

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    The senate is by no means fair or democratic, but its borders reflect something that exists apart from the purpose of electing senators and whose borders are not drawn for the (sole) purpose of obtaining a majority in the Senate.

    It's not gerrymandered in the way that a "whites-only" sign isnt sexist.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    I don't see any logic behind giving every state equal representation when each state is not equal in population, commerce, or even territory.

    I think the need for both a senate and a house is important, and the distinction between the two would be that individual districts select the house appointments while the state as a whole decides the senators.

    I think the additional chamber of the senate helps quality control over changes by the house, and makes it harder for harmful changes like those by the GOP to pass while incentivizing changes popular by the larger majority.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    1 = In the original Constitution there was supposed to be one Congressperson for every 30,000 citizens. We're apx 300 million, which would work out to about 10,000 Congresspeople. I think we can agree this would be a tad unwieldy

    2= Term limits would just mean the same fat cats have to get new stooges more often.

    3=The whole point of Senators was to make sure that the smaller states got equal representation.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)
    1. We don't need to set the number at 30,000. But, hypothetically, if we did, then we can count 150 Million votes in a couple of days, so I think we can reasonably count 10,000 in a couple of hours, although we're going to have to rework who gets time to speak before congress and for how long and also do something about the Filibuster.

    2. If the current system shows us anything it is that the corruptness of an individual does not correlate to a short time in office. Term limits are important to prevent corrupt people from amassing power and influence over a long period of time, such as in the SCOTUS. Monied interests have been shown more likely to put weight behind reelecting people known to play ball than newcomers.

    3. Conversely it means larger population states get less representation. Fuck the smaller states. The few should not rule over the many.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    There are 168 hours in a week.

    If we had 10,000 Congress people and each had five minutes to present an idea it would take about 35 days for everyone to introduce themselves.

    There's a science fiction novel that tossed this idea out as a very minor plot point, but I do like it.

    Change from voting by location to letting people pick their own districts.

    Any group that can show it represents a group of sufficient size gets one Congress member.

    People can choose to be 'gun owners,' 'mass transit users,' 'single mothers,' 'factory workers,' 'farmers,' 'polygamists,' or any other designation they choose.

  • source
  • parent
  • [+] -9 points 6 months ago (13 children)
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (10 children)

    As bad as Catholics can be, they are a bit player in the US religious landscape. I reject the premise that they are still the standard by which American "Christianity" sets its course. I'm not defending them exactly, I'm just saying they aren't the most serious problem. By far the most dangerous are the post-second-reformation evangelicals. American Catholics are barely even Catholic by most measures, and are far more heavily influenced by American Pentecostals, Adventists, Mormons, and most dangerous of all Southern Baptists. Even their own forebears would consider what they've become blasphemous heretics.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 10 child comments
  • [+] -6 points 6 months ago (9 children)
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (8 children)

    That's almost entirely backwards

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 8 child comments
  • [+] -2 points 6 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    That's accurate. The idea that they have anything to do with American Christianity is however entirely false.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [+] -5 points 6 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)
  • [+] -4 points 6 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    No, I said professional help. See a doctor. Tell them these things so they can help you. You need help.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Religious discrimination is already prohibited by the Civil Rights Act and religious speech is protected by the first amendment. Furthermore, all recognized religious institutions are untaxed, there was even a segment where talk show host John Oliver founded his own recognized religion as an example.

    The nation was founded by Anglican Seperatist Pilgrims fleeing the Roman Catholic influences. Protestants are double the number of Catholics in the USA.

    If anything, I believe we need to start treating all religions like business institutions.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    There's plenty of extremely accomplished and well respected legal Scholars and constitutional Scholars and and such who are writing and operating right now. You don't hear about them much because they're not you know clickbait Worthy, but they're out there. There's no reason to think they are less capable than the founding fathers. We tend to mythologize the founding fathers to an absurd degree.

  • source
  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    You fucking know it would be vibe written by AI

  • source
  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago

    Snap elections. If someone fucks up, vote em out. No more of this "oh no I guess we have to wait 4-5 years before we can do anything" bullshit.

  • source
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Most important thing is:

    Votes should be out of ALL SEATS, not only those present.

    Example: 101 seats in a legislature

    51 Team A

    50 Team B

    Team B shouldn't be able to just assassinate 2 of Team A to win majority. Fuck that shit. An empty seat should be treated as if it were a "no" vote.

    The current system is basically favoring the side that supports political violence. And this shit is the same around the world. Just block your opposition from entering the building and voila! You get a majority.

    Seriously am I the only one in the world that see this bullshit! Why are politicians so dumb? I should run this planet goddammit.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    You'd need to get 1,000 random Americans in a room for a year with supervised communication/visitations with their family. No chance for sponsorships, no being bought off, no one is a political figure.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (13 children)

    I don't think the Constitution at all needs a rewrite. I think the ideals of the Framers are just as important and valid today as they were when they were put to paper. Our problems come not from inadequacies in the Constitution, but from our own inadequacy to follow its teachings.

  • source
  • hideshow 13 child comments
  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (5 children)

    The Constitution isn't a holy text with "teachings".

    Even the guys who wrote it, thought it had a lot of problems and didn't think it would last 50 years.

    It realy should be completely be re-written. With an expiration date built in, to ensure it gets re-written in the future.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    The problem is-- who is going to re-write it? This is a serious question. Do you really think a consensus of those currently running the US government could do better than the Framers?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    No they won't. But someone will. Because someone would need to. Probably a lot of people. And the states would need to ratify it. If you can get all the states on board with something, it might be better than what we currently have. It might not.

    But that doesn't matter. What we have today is broken. Unquestionably, it needs a major overhaul. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the United States of America. The Framers weren't special people. They were ordinary men. No smarter than us today. And we understand the world today much much better than they ever could. So I'd bet on any random one of us, over them.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    We come down to the same underlying problem that we have today- the people of the country are not actively engaged in the political process, not nearly to the same degree the Framers intended.

    The difference between those people who wrote our constitution and the people we have today is those people recognized the importance of what they were doing. They were willing to stand up and fight and die if necessary to create a free society. Today the inheritors of that free society largely can't even be bothered to vote, let alone put in an hour or two of research to figure out who to vote for.

    So I will agree with you that the wording of the original document is imprecise, and a lot of what we now call constitutional law comes as much if not more from various Court decisions than from the document itself. But given the situation that we have currently, I am genuinely curious what you think could be improved? Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution, knowing the amount of influence various people and groups and companies have over our political process, a. What do you think could or should be changed or improved, and b. How likely is it do you think that would actually happen without the process being corrupted?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution

    We don't know who. Members of the current government certainly wouldn't. They have too much invested in the current system. They'd do everything they could to fight it. No revolution ever included officials or influencers from the old government.

    As for what changes would be needed? That would be a massive list. Heavily dependent on details.
    Generally speaking:

    • More explicit guardrails around corruption.
    • Less centralized power in the executive branch. Maybe multiple "Presidents"
    • A mechanism for the public to unilaterally recall an elected offical.
    • Intrabranch enforcement of powers over each other. So the courts can't just be ignored.

    That's just the high flyers off the top of my head.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I completely agree on corruption. And I would love a uniform mechanism for elected officials to be recalled.

    That said, the rest of what you described I don't think it is due to problems with the Constitution, but rather with the people in government. The executive branch has seized a huge amount of power not because the Constitution granted it but because the other branches let them have it and do not appropriately enforce their own checks and balances against the executive.

    The dysfunction of Congress is a primary issue. But that is because the idiot voters keep electing the same assholes with no research until they literally die of old age. The result in Congress is too busy serving their own ends to really exert power over the executive or properly manage the courts. That is not a constitutional problem.

    And the courts make rulings all the time that get ignored, but judicial doesn't hold anyone's feet to the fire. Also not a constitutional problem.

    I think you could fix a lot of this pretty simply with an amendment or two. 1. Voting day is a paid national holiday. 2. Term limits in Congress. 3. Legal prohibition against gerrymandering. 4. An explicit process to recall any politician or judge in any federal position- 1. Need a petition signed by 5% of their constituency, or 1 million people if federal. 2. A majority vote 6 weeks after the petition is approved.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (4 children)

    As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It's clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal behaviors and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.

    For goodness sake, judicial review isn't even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. "our own inadequacy to follow its teachings"). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don't matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious "patch" amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    The thing is, for the past 50 years, it seems everyone has become afraid of touching it. There have been so many ammendments, the constitution is made to be changed, get on with it

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    In fairness, one of the issues is that there's an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they're constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I got a feeling that something akin to the Great Depression is coming soon, and that there will be a repeat of the late 20s early 30s… could a new Roosevelt even appear again today?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    I don't really have an answer for who should write it but I think they need to think about how MAGA came into power and create precautions against it ever happening again.

    If politicians commit serious crimes, they need to be immediately removed from office and barred from running again

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    To be honest stuff like that should be delegated to team of historians lawyers and engineers. And put on the github like open source code before implementing.

  • source
  • [+] -7 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    White men should have no access to it when it's written for starters.

  • source
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] [S] 1 point 6 months ago (4 children)

    Then who would you pick to do it?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] -2 points 6 months ago (3 children)