After a particularly disappointing night of election results for Republicans, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) lamented “pure democracies,” where major decisions are left up to voters …
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You’re doing the thing that I’m talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President’s set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it’d be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic “so fix it” switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn’t the case, but wishes aren’t worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that’s almost impossible to update because it’s full of ancient proprietary software that doesn’t play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
No, I didn’t miss that part. I just happen to know what that part applies to, and there is plenty of readily available reform that only needs a normal law to enact that is not being enacted. The obviously broken major… “bug”, as per your metaphor, of the Supreme Court being fundamentally broken does not need any of that legacy code, just a functional majority in the legislative. It’s not the only example.
The fatalistic notion that the system is fossilized in place and has no room for reform is my point. Sure, there are some fundamental issues that require near-universal control of every state’s legislature and that’s become incredibly hard politically, but there are also massive issues that don’t.
And for the fossilized part, you need to start with educational reform and have a century-long plan to de-lobotomize about half of your population. Because I’m not sure that if you can’t hope to reach a widespread consensus you can expect to enforce that reform in any other way, either.
Cool.
So fix it.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You’re doing the thing that I’m talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President’s set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it’d be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic “so fix it” switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn’t the case, but wishes aren’t worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that’s almost impossible to update because it’s full of ancient proprietary software that doesn’t play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
No, I didn’t miss that part. I just happen to know what that part applies to, and there is plenty of readily available reform that only needs a normal law to enact that is not being enacted. The obviously broken major… “bug”, as per your metaphor, of the Supreme Court being fundamentally broken does not need any of that legacy code, just a functional majority in the legislative. It’s not the only example.
The fatalistic notion that the system is fossilized in place and has no room for reform is my point. Sure, there are some fundamental issues that require near-universal control of every state’s legislature and that’s become incredibly hard politically, but there are also massive issues that don’t.
And for the fossilized part, you need to start with educational reform and have a century-long plan to de-lobotomize about half of your population. Because I’m not sure that if you can’t hope to reach a widespread consensus you can expect to enforce that reform in any other way, either.