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this post was submitted on 30 May 2024
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And still some see the US constitution as this pinnacle of democracy when it's vastly outdated by now
Even the founding fathers anticipated a lot of reforms and for the whole thing to become obsolete quite soon but yet here we are with people worshipping them as this infallible being and weighting their words on a scale as if it's impossible for them to be wrong
Eh, the founders more or less ensured that a wealthy land-owning aristocracy would be able to overrule the will of the people if need be. That's more or less what the SCOTUS is there for, to ensure things don't get too democratic.
The US was an early modern democracy, but has never been a particularly good one.
It's a shame they made it so hard to modify. Both the 2/3 of both houses or 3/4 of states routes are quite unfeasable when there are only two quite polarised parties... :-/
...which is why they built a mechanism into it to make alterations. But the people upset about things like the electoral college don't have the support necessary to use that mechanism.
The problem is that even a Constitutional Convention gives more power to land than people. If one actually happened it would probably end with amendments forbidding divorce, abortion, and interracial marriage.
Specifically in the case of a Constitutional Convention 2/3 of states have to agree to have one and 3/4 of states have to agree to any changes.
You'd have an easier time convincing the federal government to condense a few states - we don't really need TWO Dakotas, and Montoming seems like a good idea. Maybe also split California into a few pieces. The whole "land over people" thing is only really a problem because a couple of states blow the curve - House apportionment is done in a fashion that mathematically minimizes the average difference in people/representative between states while having a fixed number of representatives, but California blows the curve by being so utterly massive compared to any other state and there just not being enough representatives to go around. So all but a few states are pretty close in terms of people/representative, a couple are sitting at the 1 representative minimum while being tiny, and California blows the curve on the other side.
Either increase the House size, merge some of the smallest states, split California up or all of the above - and all of those can be done without passing an amendment.
Of course, then Texas will invoke the clause in the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States and split itself into five states, each of which gets its own Senators and whatever number of Representatives the math would work out to.
The whole 2 parties thing isn't even in the constitution tho, is it? I'm not American so I might not be as familiar with the details
The voting system makes it so the system will always tend toward two parties. Parties aren't in the constitution at all. That's where you get occasional independent candidates
No, parties and primaries (which are just parties borrowing election infrastructure to choose who they support) aren't in the Constitution at all. But first past the post voting always trends towards two party systems as a stable equilibrium.
It's not. We've had third parties before, and we do still occasionally have independents take seats in congress(we have 3 currently)
They'll never be even close to majority though, and they will never take the presidency.