Apparently OWS has included a constitutional convention as a part of their demands. The goal would be to pass an amendment or two regarding money in politics, yada yada.

But my question is this:

Regardless of your political view, does the potential for positive change through holding a constitutional convention outweigh the risks of passing something damaging?


I think it could go both ways. OWS could get what they want, or their opponents could organize and get the opposite passed. I'm of the general opinion that we need to change some very fundamental things about how our country is run, so we might as well get to work fighting about it.

10/21/2011 1:04:56 PM

Quote :

" Regardless of your political view, does the potential for positive change through holding a constitutional convention outweigh the risks of passing something damaging?"

Yes, absolutely. We can always roll back amendments that didn't work (See prohibition). We should be way, way more daring when it comes to passing new amendments. Was it Jefferson or whoever who suggested (admittedly, probably facetiously) that the whole damn thing be ripped up every generation and rewritten from scratch?

10/21/2011 1:15:07 PM

^ Even if you can roll back bad amendments, you could find yourself paying for them for years to come. Organized crime had a huge boom during prohibition that took decades to counteract. Even worse is that it appears we didn't learn our lesson (see the war on drugs, which is just prohibition without the constitutional amendment). That said, I'd rather see more attempts at amendments than just random constitution ignoring legislation.

Of course, you have to ask yourself, given the propensity of the government to completely ignore the constitution anyway, why would we expect a new amendment to have any effect?

And yes, it was Jefferson that though the whole thing should be torn down and rebuilt every 20 years or so, in part because he heavily disagreed with the people being able and allowed to hold their future generations in captivity for their choices. It would certainly be interesting if federal laws all had a fixed expiration that required them to be revoted every so often.

10/22/2011 9:16:28 AM

We've had a pretty long stretch without changing The Constitution. It's only happened once in the last forty years and that was 19 years ago.

I've wondered if a lack of willingness to bring The Constitution up for review for long periods of time leads to an increased willingness to violate it and increase ability to get away with those violations.

Sort of an "out of sight, out of mind" principle.

Also, the longer it's out of the direct public consciousness the more it just becomes some semi-sacred historical artifact that people won't feel has real relevance as a living document.

Maybe someone should bring the Titles of Nobility amendment before the states again, just to reinsert The Constitution into public debate again.

10/22/2011 10:20:52 AM

Quote :

"Was it Jefferson or whoever who suggested (admittedly, probably facetiously) that the whole damn thing be ripped up every generation and rewritten from scratch?"

This was the opinion of many late Enlightenment thinkers who noticed that social contracts seem to carry less legitimacy when no one currently living under them was alive when they were negotiated. A valid point as far as I can tell.

[Edited on October 22, 2011 at 12:55 PM. Reason : ]

10/22/2011 12:53:39 PM

Quote :

"Of course, you have to ask yourself, given the propensity of the government to completely ignore the constitution anyway, why would we expect a new amendment to have any effect?"

True

And since when is OWS a beacon of adherence to the Constitution?

Quote :

"I've wondered if a lack of willingness to bring The Constitution up for review for long periods of time leads to an increased willingness to violate it and increase ability to get away with those violations."

Maybe.

Quote :

"Regardless of your political view, does the potential for positive change through holding a constitutional convention outweigh the risks of passing something damaging?"

Nah, give 'em a chance. If you don't, they'll just spend their time fucking something else up anyway, and if they pass a stupid amendment, well, we ignore most if the good ones, so I guess we can ignore a shitty one.

10/22/2011 1:22:59 PM

Sucks to say it, but the Constitution has become irrelevant. A constitution is only as good as those that are elected to uphold it, which is a reflection of the people. Corruption has completely saturated the system, and now, we don't have a government that represents the people, we have an elaborate system of private gains and public losses.

I saw an OWS sign that said, "Capitalism cannot be reformed". While I disagree with the person's definition of capitalism (what we have is not capitalism, it is crony capitalism or corporatism), I agree with the actual effect. It might actually be impossible to dismantle the parasitic state-corporate complex through federal politics. If state legislatures had the gumption (and a mandate from the people) to fix this shit, then I think it could happen. It would require a substantial shift in public awareness...so we may be screwed.

10/23/2011 2:15:09 PM

we need a constitutional INTERvention.


Remind the government who we are.


We have a library of laws larger than any one person can read in a lifetime, much less memorize.
We need to scrap them and go back to the barebones constitution!

10/23/2011 5:51:07 PM

Quote :

"We have a library of laws larger than any one person can read in a lifetime, much less memorize. We need to scrap them and go back to the barebones constitution!"

The Constitution is silent on way too many matters for government to function properly without statutes and regulations derived from them; also IIRC it's a lot harder to scrap the numerous treaties that have been signed and ratified over the years, which occupy a level of pre-eminence between the Constitution and Federal statutes (treaty provisions override conflicting statutes yet may be nullified by conflicting Constitutional interpretation).

As an example, the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to tax income and imports, but it says nothing about the rate of taxation or any exemptions or deductions; we need statutes from Congress to set the broad outlines (which must comply with international treaties, like free-trade agreements) and then the regulatory agencies (also created by Congress and largely staffed, at least at the top level, by the President with Congressional approval) set down the finer points in accordance with the statutes and ensure that the regulations are enforced.

If the Constitution were a complete system of law, it would itself be too long to readily comprehend, although I will admit that our current corpus of law is too large and difficult to understand.

I personally think that a good reform would be to make available an official compilation of the effects of judicial rulings, much as the United States Code compiles the cumulative effects of standing and permanent statutory law (as opposed to temporary provisions like annual appropriations) and the Code of Federal Regulations compiles the cumulative effects of standing and permanent regulations; then such a "Code of Federal Jurisprudence" would make it easier to look up how the Supreme Court (and appellate and district courts, where their rulings have not been appealed) interprets the Constitution and any laws or regulations whose interpretation has been brought before it, basically a lengthy statement of the current state of precedent.

10/23/2011 7:20:13 PM

I agree that the government needs to be rewritten periodically, but we've already had several drastic changes in government -- civil war and depression/wwII. These changes weren't particularly democratic, but they were big nonetheless.

10/23/2011 7:34:25 PM