Comment by qingcharles
6 days ago
I've laughed ever since United States v. Jones (2012), the GPS tracker-stuck-to-vehicle case.
The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791. This prompted the famous hypothetical of an officer secretly squeezing into the trunk of a horse-drawn carriage to track someone's movements over several days.
The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?
What on earth do you mean? The practical way is the same as it always was: subsequent amendment. The fact that it requires consensus is a feature.
This reads the same way as people who say things like “we just have to accept that Congress is broken and can’t pass new legislation.” Like hell we do!
They mean ‘have you seen congress? Good luck’, not that the mechanism is mechanically harder to use.
This. Getting enough states to agree on a change would be a fool's errand I think. It seems like the reds and blues can't agree on anything at all any longer.
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People in my country hate eachother yet nobody pretends it's still 1848- the year the Dutch constitution was written.
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>The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791.
Redcoats in your home, comparing notes with all the other redcoats who live in your buddies house and hassle your bartender, watch the comings and goings of everyone else around town, etc, etc.
> The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?
Of course there is, it is just being done - the constitution is being rewritten out right now by supreme court. All you need is a majority on a 9 person commission.
>The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?
Given that this isn't an issue in any other modern democracy, I'd say "bug."
The slow pace of change is a feature, not a bug. It's fine to wait decades or centuries until we have broad consensus before making amendments. While this might seem maddeningly frustrating or unjust in the short term, in the long term it makes our republic more stable. The USA has had an uninterrupted system of government since 1789. How many other major countries can say the same?
> The slow pace of change is a feature, not a bug.
To a point. It seems to have ground to a halt.
> The USA has had an uninterrupted system of government since 1789. How many other major countries can say the same?
Quite a few of them can say "we took those good ideas and built on them".
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> The USA has had an uninterrupted system of government since 1789.
Sort of. We had a civil war. We had a second founding. Then we had violent overthrowing of the reconstruction governments in the south. It has been less than 100 years since the US has provided the franchise to everybody, and even then this is a bit questionable.
Instead of constitutional amendments we get aggressive reinterpretation of the text by politically motivated efforts to change the courts. Despite no change to the constitution itself we've created criminal immunity for presidents and overturned interpretations regarding separation of powers than have been in place for a century.
Ya, screw all those people who have to suffer in the short term!
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
Eh, since it would most likely be used to remove some key right….
Well it's a feature in that the ratification rules were part of an intentional illicit rewrite of the constitution. We could make it easier to modify like other nations, but that also makes it easier to repeal.
I think the fix is to require more political parties to be involved, so a 51% majority of a single party can't remove federal laws whenever they have a majority. Then you wouldn't need an amendment to solve controversial problems.
Anything requiring bipartisanship can be gamed with synthetic parties, the legitimacy of which will surely be deemed a nonjusticiable political question.