The Joe Biden Presidency II : He's too old...or something like that!

I'm just looking for any way to fix this mess without suspending or amending the Constitution-- because an amendment anytime soon is about as likely as a two- headed President. And suspending it kind of defeats the point unless a Convention results...

And a decade or two of this Court will ruin the nation.

I won't be here, but I don't want it to be what I leave behind, and I ain't leaving much else...I do hope for a huge blue wave and control of leg and exec-- but jud is almost out of reach.

 

13 circuits requires 13 judges. That is not packing. That is being fair on the workload of the judges.

 

Why is this Constitution in its current form so valuable? The informal norms held the country together, not any specific list of legislative powers. We need a system that entrenches those informal norms, makes people row together regardless of their partisan views.

 

Know when you leave this fight, I will pick up your sword and I am working on cultivating a generation of new warriors.

 

That would be the UK more or less wouldn't it?

I think there's nothing really wrong with our constitution except that too many people have gotten careless about administering it; and that it is bad for a country to get in the habit of setting aside constitutions rather than amending them.

And ours is designed to express the break from the legal traditions of Europe vis-a-vis individual rights, which I think is/was an important event...

 

Hopefully crook not a sword (the shepherd's kind not the Nixon kind.) But I appreciate the sentiment and I hope you can bring about the promised land of Lincoln and King and the Great Society of LBJ and all that other good stuff in your lifetime.

But remember-- "the first duty of a revolutionary is to stay out of jail."

"30 days in the workhouse
But don'tcha shed no tears
If I'd a been me a black man
They'd a give me 30 years"
(Lou Whitney)

 

I wouldn't call the UK and its Westminster-style constitutional monarchy an ideal example.

Closer to the ideal is the US immediately after the Civil War when there was consensus that the existing system simply could not work. Obviously we'd like that without the preceding war!

 

Well they don't really bother with a constitution as I understand it, so isn't it norms holding the whole thing together?

I mean you are there, and it is your field as well, so you tell me, but that is the way folks from there have explained it to me.

 

Yes but the informal norms need to be reinforced with legitimate institutions in the US because the UK isn't working swimmingly just on informal norms. You need both.

 

Because it…and those norms that we hope will hold despite the battering they’ve taken from one side of our political divide…are the only thing that will keep us from a destructive and deadly civil war that will be fought in all 50 states and will wreck the global economy?

 

Oh ok, but let's get that messaging right

 

This. Times a million.

 

The logical response to that is, “of COURSE it is not perfect! If the original signers thought it was perfect, there wouldn’t be a process to amend it.”

of course, logic is to the current GOP what the Cross is to vampires, so I’m not saying that’s an effective argument.

 

The conservative, Trump-supporting election official in Arizona who refused to bow to Trump's demands that he agree to a set of false electors, "Rusty" Bowers. I mean, I appreciate his backbone. But he's said this when interviewed: "It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired." Which was why he refused to not do his constitutional duty, so that's nice. But, on the other hand, WTF? Divinely inspired? A document that does not mention god; where the First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" ; that allowed slavery to continue to exist. You can go on, of course. But, to your point, while a remarkable document, it has required amendment after amendment to address its many shortcomings. How anyone could see it as divinely inspired is beyond my comprehension. And yet...

 

I wonder how a new Constitutional Convention would turn out?

 

No mention of the Russian prisoner swap here yet? The one that only Trump could have negotiated?

Very glad that we have competent leadership in place.