> Why does anyone still care what the founders intended? They're not prophets…
As a foreigner whose country changed constitutions a good dozen of times since the USA passed its own and amends it more or less yearly, this used to baffle me. My take is that there is so little that units American together nowadays that they cling strongly to every anchor they can find.
> Originalism is as bad in jurisprudence as orthodoxy is in religions.
There's nothing stopping you from rewriting the laws. Religions don't work that way.
Although, the US constitution is almost a religious text the way it's treated as almost sacred. Why does anyone still care what the founders intended? They're not prophets...
> This is a compromise that made sense in the 18th century, not the 21st.
Exactly!
People act like our[0] Constitution is some inviolable, sacrosanct tome with words that must be revered and held close, unchanging and unchanged forever. Yet they seem to skip that we've modified the thing TWENTY EIGHT TIMES and that every Much Revered Framer(tm) anticipated that we'd not only change it as often as needed, we would very likely scrap the whole thing and do it again every few generations.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that mandates that the compromises, adjustments, and tweaks our nation's founders made must persist beyond tomorrow, except our own collective will to not bother with or to actively resist change. It's why I very much enjoy hearing at least one of the major parties actively talk about modification of the Electoral College or the makeup of the Supreme Court or how the legislative bodies of our nation operate. Maybe their ideas are good ones, maybe they're not, but the one thing we MUST NOT DO is shy away from a willingness to keep our country's governance current.
0 - By "our," I mean the collection of people who are citizens of the United States of America. Other nations can and do amend their nations' basic laws as they see fit.
>The American system of relying on centuries of tenuous interpretation of a fairly short document just isn't as much of an improvement as you think.
Having an unelected, unaccountable individual who leeches off the tax system: this is anachronistic but fair, it's about balance of powers, its an important part of our cultural heritage, it doesn't even cost that much why do you care.
Having strong founding principles and rights that are cautiously amended: this is tenuous, this goes too far, free speech too extremist, why bad man own gun.
> did you miss the part where certain very prominent Americans have been vocal about how inconvenient the Constitution is and that any provision of it which they disagree with should be 'terminated'
Those prominent Americans include the original authors of said constitution: they always knew it would be a living document to be modified via amendments. Constitutional "originalists" who believe we should be totally beholden to a 240-year-old document with no changes are the ones who are not following either the spirit or the letter of the constitution.
> The problem we have is, the US Constitution isn't being followed in the first place.
I hear this pretty frequently and often and I wonder, perhaps the constitution is inadequate to the task of governing the US in the 21st century? It seems like no one can agree on what it means - I'm told that we need highly educated legal scholars to properly interpret it before the Supreme Court, but there seems to be less consensus on it than there was in previous centuries.
>Either our founding document matters as the backbone of our Laws or it doesn't.
Nitpick, the constitution isn't a founding document. There was that whole Articles of Confederation thing.
Congress isn't the final authority of if laws are constitutional or not. The courts are. Congress and the Supreme Court commonly disagree on the constitutionality of laws. What you're proposing is essentially a oligarchy lead by the Supreme Court.
>Your outlandish logic nullifies any power that the government may have over it's people. It nullifies the social contract.
There is no social contract based on the constitution. It's just that enough people agree that it has value, so it does. That's not a social contract. No regular people voted on the Constitution. You don't have the ability to reject it if you don't agree with it.
> the argument from authority that the founders believed X, Y, and Z is pure nonsense. Who cares? They're dead. We've had nearly 250 years to learn more about what works and what doesn't.
Sure but this is a straw man. The constitution provides mechanisms for it to be changed. It has been in effect for 231 years and amended 27 times.
In general with laws, I think intent matters a lot. If the law is bad, we should change it to reflect that rather than create a twisted interpretation to suit whoever is in power.
> Today, I am forever jealous of America's Constitution. No matter which crazies are elected, they face an extreme uphill battle to remove basic rights.
Me too. In my country we've got politicians proposing amendments to the constitution every other day like it was nothing, it happens frequently enough for there to be jargon and acronyms for it: Constitutional Amendment Proposals. USA at least has a solid ideological foundation to stand on, even though its government violates the rights of americans on a daily basis.
>If the document is that far out of date, its meaning likely is too. The founding fathers were human too; skilled legislators to be sure, but we have skilled legislators today too.
I don't see how a constitution can go "out of date". It's the founding document for a nation - the individual states that compromise the US ratified a document that forms the basis of their association. Individual words and phrases have gone out of common parlance, but to change the meaning of the document would require the agreement of the parties, i.e. the states. Is it ever reasonable for the other party to tell you "Now that you've signed this contract, we're going to change it"?
The genius of the US constitution is that it sets up a mechanism for a system of government without getting into policy. Policy is decided by the legislature, and the legal code changes all the time.
But the structure has served us well and is better than, or at least no worse than, that of anyplace else. Human nature hasn't changed, after all, and there hasn't been any real advancement in government for thousands of years.
The lawyering over language happens because a document is just a means of communication, after all - there's no purpose in a written agreement if you're going to allow the meaning of the words in that agreement to change.
> Rather than try to stretch a document written for a very different time to apply to modern disputes, why not hold a new convention, with a remit not to figure out what people were thinking 200+ years ago, but to figure out the best answers to the questions we have today?
Because you don't need to change the structure of a government to change policy. The legislature is there to provide "the best answers to the questions we have today".
> As a non-American it always surprises me how much American's look for the past for guidance in the democracy and government.
We're not looking to the past for guidance. We're looking at what the Constitution says because it is still the supreme law of the land. People who think some provision of that supreme law of the land should be changed can propose amendments; the US Constitution has already been amended 27 times. But you're not supposed to just pretend that the law doesn't apply because you don't like what it says.
> All that was a long time ago and things have evolved.
And the US Constitution has been amended where necessary to take that into account. We amended the Constitution to abolish slavery, to give women the right to vote, to have Senators elected by the people of their states instead of the legislatures, to eliminate poll taxes, to limit how many terms a President can serve. And we can continue to amend the Constitution where necessary to fix other issues. That is how people who want to take Justice Ginsburg's advice and take advantage of advances other countries have made should do that.
> Amendments to the Constitution have become practically nonexistent.
It seems that you're taking this as a sign that the Constitution isn't still relevant. I'd ask you to consider that this might be a sign of the exact opposite, and that we can't get broad buy-in on the things that some groups see as obvious additions.
If the MLB were trying to update the rules of baseball to make it more exciting, and one camp wanted to do that by increasing the number of home runs while the other wanted to do it by increasing the number of strike-outs, it makes sense that they should sort out which approach is best before passing rules (or allowing flip-flopping every year)
> The Constitution never benefited the country as a whole
For citizens, this is so demonstrably false that I feel like I must be misinterpreting you here.
> The original constitution was a very principled document
I know that's an article of faith in the American civic cult, but it's not at all grounded in fact. The original Constitution is a pile of pragmatic compromises between competing factions faced with an immediate practical crisis, which they approached from radically different viewpoints and sets of principles.
> If the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law..." and Congress still makes a law, what are you going to do, throw Congress in jail? That's nonsense.
Actually, it's nonsense to think anything to the contrary. Either our founding document matters as the backbone of our Laws or it doesn't. Your outlandish logic nullifies any power that the government may have over it's people. It nullifies the social contract.
> The Constitution, for the most part, just states norms and procedures that the the country and government have decided to follow voluntarily, not because some authority will punish it if it doesn't.
It's not a document of 'norms' and 'procedures'. It's a structure of how our Republic is built. Either we have a structure or we undermine it. That's really it, full stop. Amendments are apart of that structure to build or take away for what that structure is to be. Not 'ought to be' not 'suggested' not 'maybe if you'd like to follow', it's a mutually agreed upon Law.
> and perhaps slave owners from before 1800 perhaps did not have all the answers.
Until Americans realise that fetishising and religiously following the words of slaveowners from the 18th century nothing will change. It's weird how the "Constitution" is taken as the words of a deity that cannot be touched and cannot be wrong by some.
Especially a bad and extremely ambiguous constitution like the American one, where the Supreme court has decided tons of things based on weird interpretations, instead of, you know, actually enacting laws and amending the constitution to add those things.
> Too many people treat the American constitution like the U.S.A. Law-Bible - ever correct, never flawed, never to be updated. That is absurd. The last amendment was ratified in 1992, and I'd say we are overdue for a few more.
This is reductive. The arguments I see and participate in are generally those who view the Constitution as an arbitrary document that can change meaning over time without amendment, and those that demand you respect the words on the pages and actually amend the Constitution through the proper channels instead looking for new ways to reinterpret it.
This is before getting into the quality of the proposed amendments: most laws can be passed statutorily by either the the States or Congress. Most disputes can be settled in Courts with no changes to the law.
So when whether or not something would be a Constitutional, which is to say, a legal violation is not the subject of debate, the quality of the proposals is.
Are you proposing any actual amendments you think Congress should take up? Or simply suggesting we pass amendments to pass amendments?
Because it’s worked. The alternative, opening up the entire system of government for debate, simultaneously, continuously, predictably tears itself apart in a generation. (That or you wind up with an unwritten Constitution only the elites can decipher.) The Constitution isn’t sacred. But it’s far from worthless as a basis of our society.
> Well, the alternative is to be an originalist, trying to determine what a bunch of dead white guys in the 16th century -meant- when they wrote it ... I find that an unhelpful approach because the world, and yes, society, change.
That's precisely why there are ways to amend the constitution. And we have been doing so for a long time - the most recent amendment is only 25 years old. That's the originalist way to dealing with the world and society changing, and the benefit of it is that it makes the change less arbitrary, and more democratic (since it's up to state legislatures, which are elected) than judicial fiat.
> The Framers were not omniscient, and the Constitution isn't a religious text.
Sure, but this is the text we have. If you don’t like what it creates, change it, there is a procedure to add amendments or change the whole thing altogether. Of course, the difficulty then is that quite a lot of people in fact like what we have and want to keep it this way.
> No, they were pretty clear about that when they wrote that pesky constitution thingy (and for good reason.)
They were clear about many other things, but the idea of interpreting constitution as it was meant by the founders has long been dead, with the coup de grace having been delivered by Helvering v. Davis. The constitution is dead, and its skin is worn by 9 people in Supreme Court who get to decide what they want it to mean basically any way they please.
As a foreigner whose country changed constitutions a good dozen of times since the USA passed its own and amends it more or less yearly, this used to baffle me. My take is that there is so little that units American together nowadays that they cling strongly to every anchor they can find.
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