CUDA wrote:Glad you explained yourself..... we all understand so clearly why you disagree
I was hoping my insinuations about the specific time periods in question would suggest where I was going, but fair enough, I can actually spell it out. Let's take each of those statements I quoted at a time:
...and giving Congress the power to override Supreme Court opinions with a three-fifths vote, without risk of presidential veto. Three-fifths of the state legislatures can also join forces to knock down a Court decision.
Have you ever heard the phrase "tyranny of the majority" used? It's basically the idea that minority populations or views can easily be quashed by default in a system run on pure majority rule. Much of the Bill of Rights is devoting to protecting the minority against this "tyranny," and the Supreme Court is the branch of the federal government tasked with enforcing this against laws that violate it. (As an aside, the Constitution never spells out the concept of judicial review as such, though it's essentially implied by the wording in two different Articles. It wasn't until the landmark
Marbury v. Madison decision in 1803 that the Supreme Court explicitly states its ability to declare laws unconstitutional. This was one of the main things I meant by saying that you have to look beyond the year 1787 to have a firm grasp on what's at stake here.)
Going through the history of the Supreme Court, which is really fascinating stuff to me at least, you can come up with literally dozens of notable examples of it overturning a law that violated the Constitutional rights of some minority position. One of the most famous includes a point when the Court initially got it wrong: in 1896, the Court ruled in
Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation in education based on race was constitutional, provided it followed the the principle of "separate but equal" facilities. Half a century later,
Brown v. Board of Education reversed this, not stopping by saying that the facilities in the case in question were unequal, but making the sweeping declaration that the act of segregation itself was inherently unequal. It's very easy to imagine that the majority of both houses of Congress at the time might have disagreed with this decision, and if the proposal here had been instituted, a blatant injustice against African-Americans would have been allowed to continue. 60% is by no means a huge majority...whatever party was in power would essentially have carte blanche power over the Supreme Court, which stomps all over the system of checks and balances that the Framers wrote into the Constitution in the first place.
Two of the proposed Liberty Amendments are devastating blows against imperial federal power...and giving them a brief window of opportunity to strike down both congressional legislation and Executive Branch legislation.
Here's where the author of this proposal displays a rather staggering ignorance of American history, specifically the period between 1776 and 1787. The thing is, we've already tried almost exactly what this statement proposes. They were called the Articles of Confederation...and they were
★■◆●ing terrible. The federal government created under that system was so weak that individual states were essentially able to hold it hostage by vetoing anything that went against their own narrow self-interests, to the point where it was essentially unable to do anything. Allowing states to veto acts of Congress willy-nilly would produce the same exact results...those who fail to learn from history and so forth. The bottom line is that any decent argument for granting individual states power rivaling that of the collective federal government died 150 years ago or so.
(Note that these aren't the only things I find objectionable in the original quote, but they're what jumped right out at me and made me say, "Oh holy ★■◆● no.")
