Nobody wants to be told their opinions don't matter, and they're worried that relocating to a state where opinions DO matter puts them at risk for being exposed to woke and soshulizm
I was thinking less of Southerners today and more of 18th-c. Southern, White, land-owning, slave-holders, as a sop to whom the Senate was thrown. But yeah.
This bit is clanking around in my head: "But the States need equal representation somewhere!" Why? What is a state, other than a set of lines on a map and an administrative subdivision of the country? If/since the purpose of the Senate is for States to promote/protect their interests, then maybe instead of a Senate the governors should pursue their States' interests through the president, individually and in groups based on interest/need. Coastal/Great Lakes states for fisheries, that kind of thing. It would change the nature of American federalism, in that it would (in some sense) subordinate the governors to the president (similar to Smurf's comment about administrative subdivisions). I mean the president already has more power, but in this scheme there'd be more of a reporting-type relationship, or quasi-reporting. That would somewhat dilute States' sovereignty, anathema to the almighty Founders, but I think more in line with how the country and the world work today. It's for damn sure that Wyoming's 600k people and California's 40 million should not each elect 2% of a national legislative body.
Unicameral legislature with equal sized districts crossing State lines. Weak president, separate the constitutional court from the supreme Court, no members of the current supreme Court eligible to serve on the constitutional court. Human rights enumerated in the Constitution. There is *no* small-d democratic function served by a Senate or upper House of parliament. They are exclusively ways for elites to retain power and slow the progression of the policies of the part of the legislature that represents the people.
Since we’re talking about things that will never happen, we should have co-Presidents, one from each party and they have to agree before any law is passed.
Let's abolish parties, or at the very least put them in a bathtub* and waterboard them to within an inch of their lives *Grover Norquist-ism
The FFs were very fearful of parties and set up the Constitution with an eye towards nulling their influence. See Federalist No. 10. Of course then the author of Federalist 10 was instrumental almost immediately in the creation of parties.
Many countries have courts whose only purpose is to interpret their Constitution. For instance in Spain they rule on treaties, laws, and human rights issues. They don't need to have a court case to do this, you can make a request directly to the court for interpretation. Our supreme court chooses itself from available cases coming through the regular court system when and how to interpret the constitution instead. They are both a final court of appeal and a constitutional court and they can decide whether to take a case or not In some cases a constitutional council (like in France) will review EVERY proposed law for constitutionality before it is signed by the president. Our system is ridiculous. Waiting for clarification until the perfect case comes is dumb, and so is letting the court create constitutional questions to answer that no one asked. Also, historically, its pretty clear that the court just assigned itself the ability to interpret the constitution and invalidate laws. This was not designed behavior.
I'm very well versed in how our Supreme Court works, having actually litigated cases that ended up there. What I'm trying to understand is how a separate constitutional court would be any less likely to ******** up interpreting the Constitution than the Supreme Court as it currently exists. Would these jurists serving on the constitutional court be appointed differently or elected? How would it work?
In the case of France, not every proposed law is reviewed by the constitutional Council. For ordinary laws, a request has to be made, generally by the Parliament (the President and the Prime Minister have that right too).
The Supreme Court re-write I want is term limits. Supremes are appointed as they are now, by the President and ratified by the Senate, and are seated for a 15-year term. You get jurists in their 50s and they serve before they turn senile. More turnover so there's not a Thomas serving for 40 years. And everyone knows when Supremes are coming off the court.
Actually, I'm in favor of term limits across the board: 18 years for both House and Senate. And your years in the House count against your years in the Senate.
I edited above sorry: Our system is ridiculous. Waiting for clarification until the perfect case comes is dumb, and so is letting the court create constitutional questions to answer that no one asked. I'm actually less concerned about what answer is rendered than when it is. Also, historically, its pretty clear that the court just assigned itself the ability to interpret the constitution and invalidate laws. This was not designed behavior.
So, still not sure I understand. You want legislation to immediately be deemed constitutional or unconstitutional without actual litigation challenging it first? That's not a loaded question, I'm not saying it would be bad, but ostensibly (hehe) legislative bodies and executive admins do have counsel they consult in this regard during the law-making process. OLC being the most noteworthy example. Sure, Marbury got that ball rolling. But isn't that what you want this "constitutional court" to do?
I think copresidents is a potentially good idea, but I don't think they should have the ability to reject a law independently. My foundational values: 1. Human rights are required. They should be specifically enumerated in the constitution, and in line with the human rights recognized by modern democracies. Individuals should have a path to petition a constitutional court to guarantee their rights. 2. The government should be representative: Legislators should be directly (but not necessarily individually) elected by their constituents, and should not represent less or more constituents than some other legislator. Elections should be free, frequent, and not require spending huge amounts of money to get elected (which may mean creating strong well-funded parties that select their own slates of candidates, I don't mind that). 3. No kings. The fewer people who are required to exercise a power, the less power those people should have. They should either be extremely term limited, extremely weak (not have authority to decide whether or not to exercise their powers), or the exercise of their powers should be extremely short term without ratification by elected representatives. 4. Government should function. I don't care what party is in power, it should be taking actions to advance its agenda in accordance with the constitution. The government should not shut down because of coordinated inaction by legislators. 5. Justice delayed is justice denied. People should have a right to a speedy trial including for civil actions and quick decisions on human rights and the legality of laws so that government can function and there can be an egalitarian and certain business climate. 6. Government should resist corruption. The design of government should actively discourage corruption by weakening individuals through extreme term limits, limits on discretion in exercise of powers, and prevent obstruction of basic government functions. 7. Minority rights should be guaranteed. Thresholds for requesting constitutional review and no confidence votes should be fairly low to limit runaway majority power or lethargy.
I want there to be more than one path for something to be reviewed. Right now people at the Heritage Foundation are scouring cases nationwide to find cases with just the right facts to overturn gay marriage and many other topics. I think that if Republicans want to do that, the legislature should be able to just ask the constitutional court to decide, and once the court decides, it would be final, they wouldn't be able to pass a law to overrule the court (which they could currently do but pretty much never do) without a constitutional amendment. I want the government to function, and for special interests to have less power. If the people elect legislators who are anti-gay marriage, let them challenge it in court directly. Why not? Why are we waiting and letting monied interests and think-tanks make these choices for us? (Of course in this case, gay marriage became legal by a court decision, so they wouldn't take it because they already decided that question). Meanwhile, some case comes to the supreme court where the defense and prosecution argue about the 4th amendment and they decide to change the interpretation of the 14th amendment instead. That's crazy.
So, every state legislature would also have to address questions to this constitutional court first? Hope that court is paid well, because the workload...wheeew! I still don't understand as a practical matter how that resolves issues more efficiently or divorces moneyed-interests from having too much power. Also, are you saying that when the constitutional court decides an issue, that's it---done? So for example, if a constitutional court had decided Plessy, instead of the Supreme Court, the 1964 Civil Rights Act would've been DOA because racial discrimination in public accommodations had already been found to not violate equal protection? Can you give me an example of this?
Shelby County v. Holder. The arguments were about equal protection, but the opinion was about states rights and federalism.
Before reading, @superdave you might want to change the thread title (if you can). I had skipped this thread as just something you were complaining about rather than about saving American democracy (if possible). A better title would provide a better idea of what the thread is about. For all I knew, this was something about UNC basketball.
When I was maybe in HS I had an idea that geographic districts should be tossed in favor of letting voters self-select into groups of people from anywhere. Way to combat gerrymandering, vote-packing, and people feeling stuck in districts they felt would never represent them. Would love to war-game that.
Without reading ahead... I would make this not just about this administration, but about white collar crimes as a whole. Post Enron, Worldcom, MCI, and the lot, the white collar crimes division of the DOJ was massively stripped of it's budget. And that is directly related to the lack of indictments let alone convictions post GFC. And it is not difficult to draw a fairly straight line from that time to crypto to SPACs to this current administration's business dealings. Go bigger. Zuckerberg/Meta and Google also need to be targeted. Musk is a symptom, not a cause. I say that as there is pretty good evidence that without the promotion by Musk, Tesla would not be a notable car company, and EVs as a whole would probably be slightly ahead of where they were 20 years ago. Just like Musk, ICE is the symptom, not the cause. Abolishing ICE will not solve the problem. Media mergers, specifically. Expanding SCOTUS is a must, both for political reasons, but also for practical. Also there needs to be something done to prevent the Shadow Docket. Again, a symptom, not a cause. The issue is that Congress, as a whole, has increasingly deferred to the President. And it largely started with AUMF, but not exclusively. And it has been noted in various places (such as the Bulwark) that competent people, or even semi-competent people, are either leaving Congress or not running because Congress is not doing anything meaningful. And it is partly due to the continued deference to the President. Trump is only making this extreme, but he is not exclusive. I don't think this is wholly true. There is a hell of a lot of talent going into a hell of a lot of fields, it is just that our continued celebration of wealth makes it look like a lot of talent is being diverted into the financial system. Yes, there are a lot of very smart people there, but there are also a lot of dumb people there as well. For example, I saw a number in the past few days that something like 80% of fund managers did worse than the S&P 500 ($SPY) in this past year. If they were so smart, why are they not doing better? The issue is that we don't notice all the smart people in other areas. And that is partly because we don't celebrate intellect and intelligence. An example of this is the COVID vaccine. It used new tech and was really innovative, and likely saved millions of people around the world (possibly 8 figures). But so many people think it was created in less than a year rather than expanding on prior knowledge (the SARS almost-vaccine), and that breeds conspiracy about the product and conspiracy about the very smart people who developed it. This kind of expands on the SCOTUS issue and the Congress issue. There already is a bureaucratic process, but it is not something legal and Trump just decided to skip it, mostly. What should happen is Congress should pass some law that puts guardrails on pardons and sets some kind of requirements, before a pardon can be sent to the President. But we should be honest and know that somebody will figure out how to manipulate the system. But we shouldn't get caught up on that and make an effort at change. One that will hold up at SCOTUS.
That's fine and dandy, but it burdens those down the economic ladder with a penalty. We should make voting easier, such as allowing mail-in ballots everywhere. And if that is banned or some harsh restricted is there, penalties must go to the states that do them. Not sure what could be done that wouldn't put additional burdens on the poor. Additionally, we should move our Novembers elections to the weekend and make them federal holidays. Additionally, everybody who works on the weekend must be given X number of hours, paid, to be allowed to go vote.
Okay, I thought you were talking about a 4th Amendment case, as you stated in the previous post. But in any case, Shelby County's argument from the start was that Congress exceeded its authority when it re-authorized Section 5 of VRA in 2006. So there was always a federalism aspect to the case. And to be clear, I think the majority opinion in that case is a joke.