this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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I never proposed that the Constitution should be easier to change. For the past 30 years, there have been no changes to the constitution. In the 1900's, there were 11 amendments. That's an average of 9 years per change. I refuse to believe that in the last 31 years, there was nothing important that 75% of States could agree on. The world has changed a lot in that time because of the internet and other technology. There's definitely a lot of new things that there could be amendments about.
An example would be an amendment on privacy and data collection. Over 80% of americans feel very little or no control over data that is collected about them. 81% feel the risks of companies collecting data about them outweigh the benefits. Source of data: pew research.
There's definitely room for an amendment there. It doesn't matter how smart the founders were, the world changes and the constitution has to change to reflect those changes.
The number of languages one knows doesn't make them the best, most educated of a generation. I say this as someone who can speak, read, and write 4 languages. I can also speak, but not read or write another language for a total of 5 languages.
For someone who puts so much weight into how educated the founding fathers were, you seem to disregard the educated people of the generations currently alive. A key difference between humans and other animals is that we build upon the knowledge that previous generations discovered by writing down what we learned and teaching it to future generations. Not only do we build upon previous knowledge, but we have also made knowledge more accessible through technology. The most knowledgeable of today's generations are smarter than those of generations centuries ago.
You say the founding fathers studied ancient greek and roman governments. Modern political scientists study that too. They also study our government and what has and hasn't worked well for it since it's founding. They study what other governments are doing in this new world and how it's going for them.
You say you never said the Constitution should be easier to change then complain it hasn't changed. Spend the rest of your wall of text saying it should have changed.
The government is already supposed to be limited per the constitution. We have in there the right to not be unreasonably searched and seized. We just need a court to intervene one day. As for private companies encryption is helping, people are becoming privacy minded and existing monopoly laws should be breaking up other scenarios where it's hard. Like app store issues.
That said, I would like amendments that give us the right to refuse medication and not be treated differently in the workplace. The right to refuse vaccines without threat of being fired. As well as more privacy rights but it needs to go through the legal system.
I also wish they could have put something in there to weaken commercial interest in law making but companies were not able to grow as large as they have today because there were no computers to make book keeping easy enough.
There are ways to make constitution changes become more common without changing the 75% rule. I believe that the reason why changes have stopped is because of how deeply entrenched the two political parties have become. They know that they'll continue being in power if they don't make any changes. So, they just maintain the status quo with minimal changes.
Ranked choice voting is a way to force them to make the changes that people want or get voted out. Rn they can't be voted out as there are only two realistic options.
I agree with you that people should be able to decide what happens to their body without fear of retaliation. That's an amendment I would vote for.
Ranked choice voting seems like a over complicated way to diminish a vote. Because we don't vote for the candidates in the first place.
One person one vote is still the best way to do it imo.
What if 90% of people hated both parties. But half of them hate part A more than party B and the other half hate B more than A. They'll have to choose what they consider to be the lesser of two evils. Instead of voting for a candidate who represents their view, as was intended by the democratic system, they instead vote for the candidate who is least against their views out of two options.
With ranked choice voting they can vote for whoever best represents their views. If there aren't enough people voting for that person, then your vote would go to the next closest person to your views. And so forth and so on. In the end, imo the resulting candidate would have the closest views to the most people.
It would break up the factionalism that George Washington warned against.
So how would you vote for the people to be voted for in the first place?
What you are gonna get is a bunch of puppet candidates specifically placed to dilute another candidates votes. You just complicate actually obfuscate the vote. So that the layman gets tricked into giving his vote to a turdbag. We already have a system where your vote can go to the next vote. It's called the primaries. And most people don't vote there.
Instead encourage primary voting.