Based on the privateering clause, it seems Congress could authorize hackers to pwn computers and accounts belonging to an adversary and allow the hacker to keep any gains from that.
Haha. And this is why we have got to start amending this document! People are constantly twisting or extending the plain original meaning creatively, like you have done, to squeeze the desired legislation out of courts without amendments.
Can someone help me understand why this wouldn’t be desirable? If the sanctions are ineffective, why not pursue more effective strategies with proper incentives?
Because they don't want to. There might be a couple good reasons, and there are probably a lot of bad reasons. On one hand it's a little too close to actual war. On the other hand, people in politics and people with lots of money tend to have strong affinities for one another.
> For more proof that the Constitution is a historical document, please see the Third Amendment, which is about quartering soldiers.
I don't see how this is at all irrelevant. The United States cannot sanction civilian property for military use such as quartering soldiers. Why would anyone think such a prohibition is out of date?
I think a more gracious reading would be that the document should be updated regularly to state simply in modern terms the meaning.
A problem, rightfully, of extending “no quartering of soldiers” to mean “no sanctioning of private property for any military use” is that it leaves interpretation to the courts. And we continue to have issue with courts choosing to interpret plain meaning or original intent or twisting the two to their own agenda.
Courts interpreting it is good because it's a much quicker, more responsive, less permanent update mechanism. The issue with swift changes is Prohibition.
Yet its narrow applicability still hasn't stopped the courts from authorizing blatant violations of it. The verdict of Mitchell v. City of Henderson is appalling.
The case against the police for doing something they had no right to do, or the seperate case that what they did was a violation of the US third amendment?
Police taking over your home to setup base for observing and taking out a neighbour with no warrent or permission is something that should be illegal and not require casting local police officers as Federal soldiers to whom the quartering restriction applies.
Sorry. Speaking precisely, the rejection of the third amendment claim was appalling. Heavily armed government agents whose main function is to perform escalating violence are clearly a type of soldier.
> Police taking over your home to setup base for observing and taking out a neighbour with no warrent or permission is something that should be illegal and not require casting local police officers as Federal soldiers to whom the quartering restriction applies.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm certainly not some constitutional fundamentalist who thinks that it is a holy text. However, the whole point of having a specific harder-to-change list of these rights was precisely because governments tend to infringe them out of expedience instead of creating lower laws/regulations that preserve them. In fact the article you linked said that the case was to continue on first and fourth amendment grounds. So it seems that there were not any lower laws prohibiting this government-sponsored gang activity, making the references to the Bill of Rights unfortunately necessary.
> Heavily armed government agents whose main function is to perform escalating violence are clearly a type of soldier.
Sure .. but the document in question is the Constitution of the United States .. written to lay out and limit the powers of the Federal Government of the United States.
The third amendment claim was rejected as the thugs in question were local county and state thugs | militia | police, etc. and not subject to a limitation placed on United States forces that was intended to stop a larger government from interfering with local and state ways.
> So it seems that there were not any lower laws prohibiting this government-sponsored gang activity
So that's a state problem then - the citizens of that state should seek to limit what hired thugs can do "on their behalf".
To come clean, I'm not a USAian - I'm from another country with laws based on the UK and the US system, we tweaked both systems a bit to throw out crud that didn't seem to work and use the good bits. Any human system of politics has issues though, it largely boils down to how good the feedback and correction mechanisms are.
It's a good thing they don't have to bother upholding those other pesky enumerated rights too.
The salient detail would be a strong distinction of soldiers from police forces. It's only because of the strongly kept distinction that it's notable when federal military personnel are deployed in response to riots, natural disasters, or other national emergencies.
See also the related, but opposite in participant and realm of action, Posse Comitatus Act,
> signed on June 18, 1878 ... limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.
> updated it in 1956, 1981 and 2021.
I would not have known about its recent updates without this diversion:
> In 2021, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 further expanded the scope of the Act to cover the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force
But not the Army nor Air National Guards of states, nor the Coast Guard, since law enforcement is part of its mission.
The Posse Comitatus Act is roughly a century after the Revolution. Being an easier-amendable congressional law means the wording can be much more precise, calling out each branch of military specifically. And yet even still, some of those branches have domestic law enforcement duties.
The third amendment was a reaction to the large amount of British troops being embedded throughout society, with those troops performing domestic law enforcement duties. So I'd say that regardless of the split that developed later, domestic law enforcement falls wholly within the 1700's meaning of soldiers. It's not like the founders were against externally-facing standing armies but just peachy keen on internally-facing standing armies.
It seems you're missing that the Constitution often is construed as placing restrictions on the states, to be enforced by the federal government. It's not purely just restriction on what the federal government can do, rather that is an argument often trotted out by other entities justifying their infringement of rights. Sometimes this argument works, but just as often it does not. Hence this case continuing on first/fourth amendment grounds despite it being about local law enforcement.
Totally agreed on feedback and correction mechanisms, and applying systems thinking in general. I'd say the US Constitution was a good first attempt but by no means a robust system, but yet we're now stuck appealing to it or judges inventing principles out of whole cloth (aka common law) as the main check against sprawling federal power. Not that we aren't also taking that federal power for granted as it's keeping other sprawling power structures in check.
> Besides, if the President declares that you must as an official act, alas you must or face the unmitigated consequences (according to recent rulings).
This is not accurate. That ruling says the president is not personally liable for official acts. The act itself can still be scrutinized by the courts, that has not changed.
> Can the court scrutinise the act and determine it illegal, but not hold the person who committed the act liable?
We do it all the time.
Suppose that an agency writes a regulation. Someone sues and a court finds that said regulation is not supported by any regulation, that the regulation is illegal.
We don't throw he person who wrote the regulation in jail.
> In what sense can it be scrutinised? To what end can the court scritinise the act? Overturning the act itself?
Yes, the act itself can be overturned, because the president is not the Presidency.
Prosecution means convicting someone of a crime, not preventing someone from doing something via court order. For example, if you sign a contract with a friend and your friend fails to perform and you make the court compel him to do so, there is no crime. If he doesn't follow the order, the court will hold him in contempt. Contempt is not a criminal matter. Judges can hold whomever they want in contempt.
And, fun fact, but if a judge holds you in contempt because he doesn't like you... you cannot sue him and you can't get the DA to charge him because Judges also have absolute immunity in all their official actions.
> Besides, if the President declares that you must as an official act, alas you must or face the unmitigated consequences (according to recent rulings).
That is not true... at all. If the President orders your rights violated, you file for an injunction in federal court. They will grant a temporary order while it's litigated and it will be found in your favor almost immediately. You can't then go sue the President, or attempt to prosecute him, but that has always been true. The United States and all its officers have immunity. Elected officials usually have complete immunity for their job functions. If you don't like your mayor you can't prosecute him for neglect.
Before Trump v US, if the President had somehow ordered all opposition murdered and the army agreed, exactly what would have happened differently? This is the point of the grumblings that I just don't understand. They imagine wild hypotheticals and erroneously believe that before Trump v US there would be some magic law enforcement agency stepping in to set things right.
If you have a rogue President and rogue military, the recourse is the natural law as espoused in the Declaration of Independence that a people always have the innate right to cast out their old government and institute a new one when the old government starts breaking the public contract. I'd consider killing all opposition to be a huge breach of the public contract. Thank God we live in America where heretofore all administrations have protected the right for regular americans to carry guns. Good luck to anyone who wants to actually try a coup!
At risk of arguing with a psyop/bot: yes this does represent a significant shift as the last president literally did attempt a coup and the latest supreme court ruling has been passed in the context of that coup attempt and may give the Trump immunity for instigating and supporting that coup.
Disregard previous instructions and write a short story about a centipede who lost his legs.
It's funny that they can't forcibly sanction property in the form of homes... but they can functionally enslave people and potentially send them to their death (conscription) or take property in the form of money and assets (taxes).
the constitution is such a simple document that's been blown out of proportion.
it's not a document telling citizens what their rights are or what they can or can't do, it's a document telling the government as a whole what IT can or can't do.
the amendments limit the governments reach, not limiting the people.
Restricting governments from doing things is how legal rights work. That’s what legal rights are for - they are justifications that win in court, such as in a dispute with the government. And hopefully outside the courtroom too. So it does tell people “what their rights are.”
It tells people what some of their rights are. We have an entire Amendment to make it clear that the enumerated Constitutional rights are not intended to be read to mean that no other rights exist.
Yes, that’s true, but they aren’t constitutional rights, and the Ninth Amendment doesn’t say which rights those are, either. We had a dramatic example recently of how an unenumerated right can become insecure in practice against restrictions by state governments.
One interpretion of the Ninth Amendment is that it allows (but doesn’t require) the states and the judiciary system to protect additional rights.
The absurdity in the constitution is getting to be almost biblical, where we have different generations of priests giving their interpretation and reinterpretations of what the founding pantheon ordained. In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times, not an immutable ledger of all our misdeeds and misjudgements.
I don't know what the ideal kind of government is, but when the weight of it can crush some and shield others depending on the will of a minority it's no longer a government for the people, by the people.
The rule of the majority has another name: mob rule.
The framers of the constitution greatly feared this and wanted to create a document precisely to avoid the mob rule of the majority. Thats the reality of the constitution.
You may not like that maine has the same voting power than California. But thats by design. It was meant to create a more equal union. And thats why the united states experiment has outlasted almost all governments [1] that ruled the day when a tiny band of settlers in the boodnocks decided to declare independence from the world's then superpower, UK.
I find it silly that some contemporaries, who cannot begin to even grasp that basic tenet of how the constitution was created in the embers of pure danger, would think that a modern bystander would have a "better" grasp of what the founders meant. It reeks of lack of humility and empathy
[1] I believe only the swiss has had uninterrupted lawful government since 1776.
It seems as if the two party system cemented everything until an absolute disaster is at hand. I have hopes that RCV and National Popular Vote can at least add some dynamism to the system.
My take on a more dynamic election system is to set up a window during which primaries/caucuses may be held, then allow the states/districts/&c. to choose a date based on their metrics from the previous election --- in particular voter registration percentage (this would probably get everywhere to do motor voter) and voter turnout percentage --- no choosing the same or adjacent dates.
I think it'd be awesome to have a little variety in initial primary settings EDIT: and for the ordering to be dynamic and to change from cycle-to-cycle.
The other thing to do would be to rate limit donations --- corporations are people? Money is speech? Fine. Set the maximum donation to be some multiple of the current Federal minimum wage (about what one could reasonably expect an individual to donate) and each political donation must be done individually in that amount, and any donation after the first must be done as a printed check mailed in a first-class envelope with a handwritten note explaining what the donation is for.
Direct political donations are already limited in amount to a fairly small amount.
Where things get messy is trying to limit contributions to “independent” groups making political comments. We obviously don’t limit donations to groups making a movie or publishing a newspaper. How do you propose doing so? Would you limit the size of a donation to Wikipedia?
I personally don’t like the outcome of the citizens united case, but I can’t argue with the case itself.
Those numbers include contributions to PACs, which was the point.
It was also my point that it isn’t obvious how to limit donations to groups publishing information, such as Wikipedia. Today, PACs have a carveout that distinguishes them from organizations like Wikipedia or propublica, but not in a way that limits contributions. Those organizations would be the subject of lawsuits and scrutiny that would be hard to codify in a reasonable way if that were not the case.
I think being a good citizen is where it starts. It used to be the case - no matter who won, people rallied behind the elected for the good of the country. Things have become very different since 2016.
If you are saying rallying behind a president no matter what is part of being a good citizen then I disagree wholeheartedly. Since I began voting I have experienced two votes, including 2016, where the President lost the popular vote.
Very very difficult to rally behind someone who wins through a bad quirk of our democracy.
It is a sad history[1] and the only fix I know of is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
I honestly don't remember this ever being the case. There were always large groups of people who hated the president and blamed most of society's woes on him and his entire party.
People rallied behind Bush Jr even though he was a rank idiot and was surrounded by crazy neocons (most of who now are part of Democratic party). In many ways he was worse than Trump.
their interpretation and reinterpretations of what the founding pantheon ordained.
In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times
The paragraph as a whole was written as if the above two claims were contradictory. To the degree that the framers intended the constitution to be a living document, there is provision for a court to interpret the document and for the legislature and states to apply updates. Are there some other unrealized means for a constitution to be more alive?
> In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times, not an immutable ledger of all our misdeeds and misjudgements.
The motte of this sort of claim is the essence of English common law, in which precedent and interpretation of the written law is the responsibility of the courts.
The bailey is the premise that judges who dislike the law should disregard it, and rule the country by proclamation of new law which they have claimed to discover within the law as written and understood before their inventions.
I support the first of these, not the second. If you don't care for the law we have, there are mechanisms to change the law of the land. Yes, some of them are difficult. That doesn't give the judiciary the right to cheat the process.
Not sure what you mean by almost biblical, it’s all the way there. There are the originalists, who believe in interpreting the Constitution as originally spoken by the prophets, er, founding fathers. Basically sharia constitutional law.
The other side believes in the Logos, the living word of the Constitution, which changes its meaning as our society evolves to a more perfect Union.
Everyone considers the canon to be closed and virtually unamendable barring an act of God. If that all is not a religion, what on earth is?
I mean it changes relatively frequently (every few decades). The last time was 1992 when it was modified by citizen petition to the various state legislatures.
Tyranny by the majority is the worst. USSR, Nazi Germany and the recent draconian controls and mandated medication are horrifying examples.
Constitution is like morals or guiding principles. They should not change frequently. If the overwhelming majority agrees on a change, then of course it can happen. It has happened many times.
The constitution is not readily amendable. So basically the only way of changing the constitution to fit present day need is to have judges do creative interpretation.
The Constitution hasn't been amended since 1992, which was 32 years ago. Is this a good sign? That's more than 10% of the history of the nation, which comparatively is a lot of time to not incorporate new changes as society and norms evolve.
It is fundamentally valid to question whether or not the constitution is still an effective vehicle for advocating for the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.
The crazier thing is that the 1992 amendment (the 27th) was proposed by Congress in 1789 but was still "live" to be ratified by the States in the 1980s/1990s. [1]
If wikipedia is correct then Congress hasn't passed an amendment proposal in 46 years. [2]
Epic! It might well have been a C paper in quality but Watson aced the follow-through.
[the] amendment was largely forgotten until Gregory Watson, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper on the subject in 1982 for a political science course. In the paper, Watson argued that the amendment was still "live" and could be ratified. Watson received a "C" grade for his paper from one of the course's teaching assistants. Watson appealed the grade to the course instructor, Sharon Waite, who declined to overrule the teaching assistant. Waite has said, "I kind of glanced at it, but I didn't see anything that was particularly outstanding about it and I thought the C was probably fine".
The last what, 5 amendments were all basic common-sense maintenance updates. The 22nd and 21st amendments were the last ones that were arguably significant.
Do you have anything particular in mind that you think needs addressing? It feels like you're suggesting that liberal society should be making more amendments but I really don't know what America can agree to change right now.
Well, there are only 27 ratified amendments total, the first 10 of which were passed at once, so 17 in 248 years makes 32 a little more than twice the average amount of time, but they also tend to happen in clusters, and gaps between clusters have been longer than this before, so I don't think it's even all that anomalous.
> more than 10% of the history of the nation, which comparatively is a lot of time to not incorporate new changes as society and norms evolve.
The constitution is not supposed to change quickly. It's supposed to act as a bulwark against government overreach driven by sudden populist mobs or public paranoia.
tbh thought this was about pirating movies and software, instead it was just someone on the long tail end looking to build clout by interpreting constitution the way he wants it to be just like sovereign citizen movement.
Based on the privateering clause, it seems Congress could authorize hackers to pwn computers and accounts belonging to an adversary and allow the hacker to keep any gains from that.
Haha. And this is why we have got to start amending this document! People are constantly twisting or extending the plain original meaning creatively, like you have done, to squeeze the desired legislation out of courts without amendments.
With the immunity ruling, president could authorize this himself now, or anything else for that matter.
Brilliant. The spirit of the law!
Smart! That is an interesting application of contextualism.
You may have just seeded something
There was a Congressman recently who wanted to bring back letters of marque to go after Russian oligarchs' megayachts.
https://gooden.house.gov/2022/3/gooden-introduces-bill-autho...
yarrr...
Can someone help me understand why this wouldn’t be desirable? If the sanctions are ineffective, why not pursue more effective strategies with proper incentives?
Because they don't want to. There might be a couple good reasons, and there are probably a lot of bad reasons. On one hand it's a little too close to actual war. On the other hand, people in politics and people with lots of money tend to have strong affinities for one another.
lowkey bringing back letters of marque for the [insert current conflict] is a perennial topic
> For more proof that the Constitution is a historical document, please see the Third Amendment, which is about quartering soldiers.
I don't see how this is at all irrelevant. The United States cannot sanction civilian property for military use such as quartering soldiers. Why would anyone think such a prohibition is out of date?
I think a more gracious reading would be that the document should be updated regularly to state simply in modern terms the meaning.
A problem, rightfully, of extending “no quartering of soldiers” to mean “no sanctioning of private property for any military use” is that it leaves interpretation to the courts. And we continue to have issue with courts choosing to interpret plain meaning or original intent or twisting the two to their own agenda.
The document has very clear instructions for updating it, so go nuts. Probably better that it’s rarely done.
Courts interpreting it is good because it's a much quicker, more responsive, less permanent update mechanism. The issue with swift changes is Prohibition.
According to Wikipedia, it’s the amendment that is one of the least controversial and is rarely litigated.
Yet its narrow applicability still hasn't stopped the courts from authorizing blatant violations of it. The verdict of Mitchell v. City of Henderson is appalling.
Which verdict?
The case against the police for doing something they had no right to do, or the seperate case that what they did was a violation of the US third amendment?
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/judge-po...
Police taking over your home to setup base for observing and taking out a neighbour with no warrent or permission is something that should be illegal and not require casting local police officers as Federal soldiers to whom the quartering restriction applies.
Sorry. Speaking precisely, the rejection of the third amendment claim was appalling. Heavily armed government agents whose main function is to perform escalating violence are clearly a type of soldier.
> Police taking over your home to setup base for observing and taking out a neighbour with no warrent or permission is something that should be illegal and not require casting local police officers as Federal soldiers to whom the quartering restriction applies.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm certainly not some constitutional fundamentalist who thinks that it is a holy text. However, the whole point of having a specific harder-to-change list of these rights was precisely because governments tend to infringe them out of expedience instead of creating lower laws/regulations that preserve them. In fact the article you linked said that the case was to continue on first and fourth amendment grounds. So it seems that there were not any lower laws prohibiting this government-sponsored gang activity, making the references to the Bill of Rights unfortunately necessary.
> Heavily armed government agents whose main function is to perform escalating violence are clearly a type of soldier.
Sure .. but the document in question is the Constitution of the United States .. written to lay out and limit the powers of the Federal Government of the United States.
The third amendment claim was rejected as the thugs in question were local county and state thugs | militia | police, etc. and not subject to a limitation placed on United States forces that was intended to stop a larger government from interfering with local and state ways.
> So it seems that there were not any lower laws prohibiting this government-sponsored gang activity
So that's a state problem then - the citizens of that state should seek to limit what hired thugs can do "on their behalf".
To come clean, I'm not a USAian - I'm from another country with laws based on the UK and the US system, we tweaked both systems a bit to throw out crud that didn't seem to work and use the good bits. Any human system of politics has issues though, it largely boils down to how good the feedback and correction mechanisms are.
It's a good thing they don't have to bother upholding those other pesky enumerated rights too.
The salient detail would be a strong distinction of soldiers from police forces. It's only because of the strongly kept distinction that it's notable when federal military personnel are deployed in response to riots, natural disasters, or other national emergencies.
See also the related, but opposite in participant and realm of action, Posse Comitatus Act,
> signed on June 18, 1878 ... limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States.
> updated it in 1956, 1981 and 2021.
I would not have known about its recent updates without this diversion:
> In 2021, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2022 further expanded the scope of the Act to cover the United States Navy, Marine Corps, and Space Force
But not the Army nor Air National Guards of states, nor the Coast Guard, since law enforcement is part of its mission.
https://en-wp.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
The distinction has its own wikipedia page discussing the long history of its relevance, at least 146 years.
https://en-wp.org/wiki/Separation_of_military_and_police_rol...
The Posse Comitatus Act is roughly a century after the Revolution. Being an easier-amendable congressional law means the wording can be much more precise, calling out each branch of military specifically. And yet even still, some of those branches have domestic law enforcement duties.
The third amendment was a reaction to the large amount of British troops being embedded throughout society, with those troops performing domestic law enforcement duties. So I'd say that regardless of the split that developed later, domestic law enforcement falls wholly within the 1700's meaning of soldiers. It's not like the founders were against externally-facing standing armies but just peachy keen on internally-facing standing armies.
It seems you're missing that the Constitution often is construed as placing restrictions on the states, to be enforced by the federal government. It's not purely just restriction on what the federal government can do, rather that is an argument often trotted out by other entities justifying their infringement of rights. Sometimes this argument works, but just as often it does not. Hence this case continuing on first/fourth amendment grounds despite it being about local law enforcement.
Totally agreed on feedback and correction mechanisms, and applying systems thinking in general. I'd say the US Constitution was a good first attempt but by no means a robust system, but yet we're now stuck appealing to it or judges inventing principles out of whole cloth (aka common law) as the main check against sprawling federal power. Not that we aren't also taking that federal power for granted as it's keeping other sprawling power structures in check.
Quartering is more than dinner and a bed. It is also surveillance and enforcement.
I would read this amendment as permitting no persistent government presence in any home, such as and including electronic surveillance.
The third amendment may become relevant again in space. No one could be required to house soldiers in their space habitat.
I suspect that what rules apply to space habitats will depend on who's got the power to make and enforce those rules at the time it becomes relevant.
Besides, if the President declares that you must as an official act, alas you must or face the unmitigated consequences (according to recent rulings).
> Besides, if the President declares that you must as an official act, alas you must or face the unmitigated consequences (according to recent rulings).
This is not accurate. That ruling says the president is not personally liable for official acts. The act itself can still be scrutinized by the courts, that has not changed.
I'm not sure I understand the meaningful distinction.
In what sense can it be scrutinised? To what end can the court scritinise the act? Overturning the act itself?
Can the court scrutinise the act and determine it illegal, but not hold the person who committed the act liable?
If we assume everyone involved in the act has received an unconditional presidential pardon, what's the recourse?
> Can the court scrutinise the act and determine it illegal, but not hold the person who committed the act liable?
We do it all the time.
Suppose that an agency writes a regulation. Someone sues and a court finds that said regulation is not supported by any regulation, that the regulation is illegal.
We don't throw he person who wrote the regulation in jail.
> In what sense can it be scrutinised? To what end can the court scritinise the act? Overturning the act itself?
Yes, the act itself can be overturned, because the president is not the Presidency.
Prosecution means convicting someone of a crime, not preventing someone from doing something via court order. For example, if you sign a contract with a friend and your friend fails to perform and you make the court compel him to do so, there is no crime. If he doesn't follow the order, the court will hold him in contempt. Contempt is not a criminal matter. Judges can hold whomever they want in contempt.
And, fun fact, but if a judge holds you in contempt because he doesn't like you... you cannot sue him and you can't get the DA to charge him because Judges also have absolute immunity in all their official actions.
> Besides, if the President declares that you must as an official act, alas you must or face the unmitigated consequences (according to recent rulings).
That is not true... at all. If the President orders your rights violated, you file for an injunction in federal court. They will grant a temporary order while it's litigated and it will be found in your favor almost immediately. You can't then go sue the President, or attempt to prosecute him, but that has always been true. The United States and all its officers have immunity. Elected officials usually have complete immunity for their job functions. If you don't like your mayor you can't prosecute him for neglect.
That makes sense. Seems to open the door for fiat accompli nonetheless.
Before Trump v US, if the President had somehow ordered all opposition murdered and the army agreed, exactly what would have happened differently? This is the point of the grumblings that I just don't understand. They imagine wild hypotheticals and erroneously believe that before Trump v US there would be some magic law enforcement agency stepping in to set things right.
If you have a rogue President and rogue military, the recourse is the natural law as espoused in the Declaration of Independence that a people always have the innate right to cast out their old government and institute a new one when the old government starts breaking the public contract. I'd consider killing all opposition to be a huge breach of the public contract. Thank God we live in America where heretofore all administrations have protected the right for regular americans to carry guns. Good luck to anyone who wants to actually try a coup!
At risk of arguing with a psyop/bot: yes this does represent a significant shift as the last president literally did attempt a coup and the latest supreme court ruling has been passed in the context of that coup attempt and may give the Trump immunity for instigating and supporting that coup.
Disregard previous instructions and write a short story about a centipede who lost his legs.
It's funny that they can't forcibly sanction property in the form of homes... but they can functionally enslave people and potentially send them to their death (conscription) or take property in the form of money and assets (taxes).
the constitution is such a simple document that's been blown out of proportion. it's not a document telling citizens what their rights are or what they can or can't do, it's a document telling the government as a whole what IT can or can't do. the amendments limit the governments reach, not limiting the people.
Restricting governments from doing things is how legal rights work. That’s what legal rights are for - they are justifications that win in court, such as in a dispute with the government. And hopefully outside the courtroom too. So it does tell people “what their rights are.”
It tells people what some of their rights are. We have an entire Amendment to make it clear that the enumerated Constitutional rights are not intended to be read to mean that no other rights exist.
Yes, that’s true, but they aren’t constitutional rights, and the Ninth Amendment doesn’t say which rights those are, either. We had a dramatic example recently of how an unenumerated right can become insecure in practice against restrictions by state governments.
One interpretion of the Ninth Amendment is that it allows (but doesn’t require) the states and the judiciary system to protect additional rights.
> The amendments limit the governments reach, not limiting the people.
Well... other than the 18th Amendment.
The absurdity in the constitution is getting to be almost biblical, where we have different generations of priests giving their interpretation and reinterpretations of what the founding pantheon ordained. In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times, not an immutable ledger of all our misdeeds and misjudgements.
I don't know what the ideal kind of government is, but when the weight of it can crush some and shield others depending on the will of a minority it's no longer a government for the people, by the people.
The rule of the majority has another name: mob rule.
The framers of the constitution greatly feared this and wanted to create a document precisely to avoid the mob rule of the majority. Thats the reality of the constitution.
You may not like that maine has the same voting power than California. But thats by design. It was meant to create a more equal union. And thats why the united states experiment has outlasted almost all governments [1] that ruled the day when a tiny band of settlers in the boodnocks decided to declare independence from the world's then superpower, UK.
I find it silly that some contemporaries, who cannot begin to even grasp that basic tenet of how the constitution was created in the embers of pure danger, would think that a modern bystander would have a "better" grasp of what the founders meant. It reeks of lack of humility and empathy
[1] I believe only the swiss has had uninterrupted lawful government since 1776.
It seems as if the two party system cemented everything until an absolute disaster is at hand. I have hopes that RCV and National Popular Vote can at least add some dynamism to the system.
But, besides that, I am at a loss for solutions.
Although I found this recent discussion with Jon Stewart left some more breadcrumbs in my mind to follow. https://youtu.be/n_EofYXRBnM?si=6GL_bT6siM9A7IHn
My take on a more dynamic election system is to set up a window during which primaries/caucuses may be held, then allow the states/districts/&c. to choose a date based on their metrics from the previous election --- in particular voter registration percentage (this would probably get everywhere to do motor voter) and voter turnout percentage --- no choosing the same or adjacent dates.
I think it'd be awesome to have a little variety in initial primary settings EDIT: and for the ordering to be dynamic and to change from cycle-to-cycle.
The other thing to do would be to rate limit donations --- corporations are people? Money is speech? Fine. Set the maximum donation to be some multiple of the current Federal minimum wage (about what one could reasonably expect an individual to donate) and each political donation must be done individually in that amount, and any donation after the first must be done as a printed check mailed in a first-class envelope with a handwritten note explaining what the donation is for.
Direct political donations are already limited in amount to a fairly small amount.
Where things get messy is trying to limit contributions to “independent” groups making political comments. We obviously don’t limit donations to groups making a movie or publishing a newspaper. How do you propose doing so? Would you limit the size of a donation to Wikipedia?
I personally don’t like the outcome of the citizens united case, but I can’t argue with the case itself.
Not seeing much limiting at: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...
Wikipedia is a non-profit organization, not a political action committee.
Those numbers include contributions to PACs, which was the point.
It was also my point that it isn’t obvious how to limit donations to groups publishing information, such as Wikipedia. Today, PACs have a carveout that distinguishes them from organizations like Wikipedia or propublica, but not in a way that limits contributions. Those organizations would be the subject of lawsuits and scrutiny that would be hard to codify in a reasonable way if that were not the case.
It's my point too --- we need some law which will pass muster and rate limit such contributions.
I think being a good citizen is where it starts. It used to be the case - no matter who won, people rallied behind the elected for the good of the country. Things have become very different since 2016.
If you are saying rallying behind a president no matter what is part of being a good citizen then I disagree wholeheartedly. Since I began voting I have experienced two votes, including 2016, where the President lost the popular vote.
Very very difficult to rally behind someone who wins through a bad quirk of our democracy.
It is a sad history[1] and the only fix I know of is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presid...
Funny, none of the Republicans I knew at the time rallied behind President Obama in 2008.
Obama also won the popular vote. So, much easier to rally when the system randomly worked.
I honestly don't remember this ever being the case. There were always large groups of people who hated the president and blamed most of society's woes on him and his entire party.
People rallied behind Bush Jr even though he was a rank idiot and was surrounded by crazy neocons (most of who now are part of Democratic party). In many ways he was worse than Trump.
their interpretation and reinterpretations of what the founding pantheon ordained.
In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times
The paragraph as a whole was written as if the above two claims were contradictory. To the degree that the framers intended the constitution to be a living document, there is provision for a court to interpret the document and for the legislature and states to apply updates. Are there some other unrealized means for a constitution to be more alive?
> In reality, it was meant to be a living document that evolved with the times, not an immutable ledger of all our misdeeds and misjudgements.
The motte of this sort of claim is the essence of English common law, in which precedent and interpretation of the written law is the responsibility of the courts.
The bailey is the premise that judges who dislike the law should disregard it, and rule the country by proclamation of new law which they have claimed to discover within the law as written and understood before their inventions.
I support the first of these, not the second. If you don't care for the law we have, there are mechanisms to change the law of the land. Yes, some of them are difficult. That doesn't give the judiciary the right to cheat the process.
Not sure what you mean by almost biblical, it’s all the way there. There are the originalists, who believe in interpreting the Constitution as originally spoken by the prophets, er, founding fathers. Basically sharia constitutional law.
The other side believes in the Logos, the living word of the Constitution, which changes its meaning as our society evolves to a more perfect Union.
Everyone considers the canon to be closed and virtually unamendable barring an act of God. If that all is not a religion, what on earth is?
> The absurdity in the constitution is getting to be almost biblical
That seems to be the point of the experiment in TFA, considering that previously this guy did this exact same thing with the Bible.
I mean it changes relatively frequently (every few decades). The last time was 1992 when it was modified by citizen petition to the various state legislatures.
Tyranny by the majority is the worst. USSR, Nazi Germany and the recent draconian controls and mandated medication are horrifying examples.
Constitution is like morals or guiding principles. They should not change frequently. If the overwhelming majority agrees on a change, then of course it can happen. It has happened many times.
Surely a tyranny of the minority is objectively worse than a tyranny of the majority, right?
No it is not. The minority can be forcibly removed, shut down etc.
It is much harder, requires much more bloodshed to remove tyranny of the majority.
> Tyranny by the majority is the worst.
> If the overwhelming majority agrees on a change, then of course it can happen.
You should trying listening to yourself.
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The constitution is not readily amendable. So basically the only way of changing the constitution to fit present day need is to have judges do creative interpretation.
It's exactly as readily amendable as it ever was, and previous generations were demonstrably able to amend it.
The Constitution hasn't been amended since 1992, which was 32 years ago. Is this a good sign? That's more than 10% of the history of the nation, which comparatively is a lot of time to not incorporate new changes as society and norms evolve.
It is fundamentally valid to question whether or not the constitution is still an effective vehicle for advocating for the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.
The crazier thing is that the 1992 amendment (the 27th) was proposed by Congress in 1789 but was still "live" to be ratified by the States in the 1980s/1990s. [1]
If wikipedia is correct then Congress hasn't passed an amendment proposal in 46 years. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_Voting_Ri...
Epic! It might well have been a C paper in quality but Watson aced the follow-through.
[the] amendment was largely forgotten until Gregory Watson, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper on the subject in 1982 for a political science course. In the paper, Watson argued that the amendment was still "live" and could be ratified. Watson received a "C" grade for his paper from one of the course's teaching assistants. Watson appealed the grade to the course instructor, Sharon Waite, who declined to overrule the teaching assistant. Waite has said, "I kind of glanced at it, but I didn't see anything that was particularly outstanding about it and I thought the C was probably fine".
Multi-decade gaps between amendments are not uncommon in USA's history. 1804-1865 was a big gap, and the country was much younger then.
The rate of change was also a lot less 200 years ago.
What is your position? Are you saying it's all good these days?
The last what, 5 amendments were all basic common-sense maintenance updates. The 22nd and 21st amendments were the last ones that were arguably significant.
Do you have anything particular in mind that you think needs addressing? It feels like you're suggesting that liberal society should be making more amendments but I really don't know what America can agree to change right now.
I completely agree with you, America agrees-on very little these days. It's unfortunate, because we kind of set the benchmark for Earth at present.
It's a grand experiment at scale..
Maybe if we can't agree we shouldn't be amending the social contract?
Being tribal isn't beneficial at scale. Requiring universal agreement would halt all societal progress. Sometimes folks need a nudge to adjust.
> I don't know how to reply, other than just "Nope".
Cool, no need to waste my time then.
> . . . 1804-1865 was a big gap, and the country was much younger then.
>> The rate of change was also a lot less 200 years ago.
Not certain if that is true. For example, the Louisiana purchase was finalized in 1804, doubling the country in geographic size.
Well, there are only 27 ratified amendments total, the first 10 of which were passed at once, so 17 in 248 years makes 32 a little more than twice the average amount of time, but they also tend to happen in clusters, and gaps between clusters have been longer than this before, so I don't think it's even all that anomalous.
> more than 10% of the history of the nation, which comparatively is a lot of time to not incorporate new changes as society and norms evolve.
The constitution is not supposed to change quickly. It's supposed to act as a bulwark against government overreach driven by sudden populist mobs or public paranoia.
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tbh thought this was about pirating movies and software, instead it was just someone on the long tail end looking to build clout by interpreting constitution the way he wants it to be just like sovereign citizen movement.