The abuse of power, the lack of respect for our institutions, the rule by edict … can those of us opposed to these create coherent rebuttals in the form of constitutional amendments that will address our time of crisis? What will these amendments say?
For fucks sake, we literally did that after founding the country and people just forget.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/articles-of-confederation
The founding fathers were so totally not infallible that they themselves said “we messed that one up” within a few years and reworked the whole thing.
They absolutely never even intended it to be a static document. It’s telling that the first published version of it is mostly composed of amendments to the main document. They couldn’t even get out the door without thinking of ten changes that needed to be made.
Yep. The sacralization of the US constitution is a later process and a perversion of the entire idea of liberal democracy as theorized then.
Which is why the French, which were doing the same thing at the time, are on their fifth republic and a bunch of them responded to their recent struggles to form a majority by proposing a whole new one to fix the problem.
When I was learning this stuff it was common to present the anglo tradition and the French tradition as the “two successful models” for constitutional democracies (blended with the idea of common law and continental law systems). I would argue that in restrospect that is inaccurate. Or at least that one of those models got exhausted faster than the other.