This Needs Fixin'

The U.S. constitution was, for it’s time, a pretty impressive piece of work.

But that time was over 200 years ago.

And in those 200 years, various factions within the U.S. have managed to warp it into the weak, twisted wreck that we have today.

Many parts of the Constitution that are written in plain language are ignored and issues it doesn’t address are dealt with by abstruse, ad-hoc rules. The courts are slow and invent new doctrines at will, the legislature is a social club that can’t even reliably pass a budget and the executive runs roughshod over even the most straightforward restrictions on its power.

The Constitution is clearly no longer serving as the basis for a stable State.

Maybe we can fix that?

The Constitution was never intended to be a static document.

It was designed to be updated, at least, and the process for incremental changes has been used several times (starting immediately after it was first ratified, in fact) but that process isn’t useful any longer. Even amendments with very widespread popular support (like the E.R.A.) can’t make it through ratification anymore.

The root problem is quite simple.

Amendments have to be approved of by the professional political class.

Any fundamental change to the system would, of course, be a threat to the established political class.

And under the U.S. constitution, amendments must not only be approved by the political class they have to be approved there first.

This has proved to work fine for passing amendments that Congress wants passed, but has not done well at all for amendments the voters want passed.

So, no real surprise there.

Having laws and amendments originate with the voters, is called “initiative”. (Having them be passed exclusively by the voters is called “referendum”.)

Initiative, as a concept, came into U.S. practice quite late, starting with South Dakota in 1898. It’s still only available in about half the states and is not available at the federal level at all.

And the problem with getting initiative added to the U.S. constitution by the existing amendment process is even bigger than for any other amendment: Congress would have to approve it first, and the whole point of having it is to be able to bypass Congress.

Which seems … unlikely.

There’s also what’s called an “Article V Convention”, which is a Constitutional method for the states to propose amendments. This would have to be approved by 2/3 of the state governments, of which only half already have initiative processes, so it faces the same problems of getting an amendment through Congress, but in 24 state legislatures, instead of just one federal legislature.

And there’s the problem.

The State is no longer functioning in any reasonable way at all, but all the Constitutional mechanisms for addressing the problem depend on the functioning of the State.

By design, this cannot end well.

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