Our Decrepit Constitution: Welcome to the Future

Our Decrepit Constitution: Welcome to the Future

The Framers were intelligent, perhaps even brilliant men. But they were not clairvoyant. They could not see into the future. They designed a government for the times they lived in, assuming that all future times would be similar.

The pace of change quickened abruptly after 1860. The Civil War accelerated the building of railroads, which in turn led to increased production from steam power. The industrial revolution brought great wealth but also brought poverty, dangerous working conditions, and child labor. The Framers could not imagine either the problems themselves, or their scale. European governments, where industry was well-established by 1860, created a safety net for victims of disclocation and unemployment. Germany passed the first unemployment and social security laws in 1889, 36 years before the U.S. passed theirs.

American thinkers have played important roles in the establishment of human rights and international institutions. Woodrow Wilson helped establish the League of Nations in 1919. The United Nations based its human rights proclamations on a speech by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wherein he defined the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The Framers recognized the importance of the first two freedoms. They did not mention the others in their Constitution.

The United Nations wrote treaties guaranteeing the four freedoms after World War II. These treaties are known to many Americans as the Geneva Accords. The United States Congress refused to ratify many of these treaties. The current Senate refuses to ratify the Law of the Sea, a treaty that formalizes traditional laws concerning the use of the oceans and their protection. The Supreme Court does not accept many international treaties as binding on the U.S. court system. U.S. Presidents have ignored the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war and torture.

The U.S. Bill of Rights needs to be extended to protect foreign nationals from ill-conceived and dangerous military adventurism, like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and interventions in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Chile. The Constitution should incorporate the International Bill of Rights, so there is no question whether U.S. Courts should recognize the rights of women, children, and the poor.

Justice Scalia claims that the Supreme Court cannot ask whether a person is guilty of a crime, only whether his trial met the bare minimum standards of due process. Likewise, Scalia claims that the Court cannot look at the reality of discrimination and voter suppression, it can only consider whether Constitutional standards are being met. Scalia challenges his critics to find a right to privacy in the Bill of Rights, although the Tenth Amendment reserves any rights not mentioned in the Constitution to the States or the People. Scalia accepts the concept of implied powers because it suits him but refuses to accept the concept of implied rights because it does not.

This ability to pick and choose which concepts to accept and which to reject is exactly what the Framers had in mind when writing the Constitution. They wanted the privileged minority to make choices for the people as a whole. The Framers assumed that these gentlemen would make better decisions than the majority of the people. After two hundred years of experiments, we now know that this opinion is false. Democracy works.

Our Decrepit Constitution: 3. The Silver Bullet

Our Decrepit Constitution: 3. The Silver Bullet

On December 12, 2000, the US Supreme Court decided that George W. Bush would be president of the United States. The Court acknowledged that the Constitution left the election of the president to the people, but decided nevertheless to intervene, something it had never done before.

The Constitution furnishes almost no guidelines for the election of the president, one of the most important political undertakings of the government. The framers intended for the president to be chosen indirectly, by electors elected by the people, not by the people themselves. The framers intended for the electors to meet after the popular vote was taken. Only then would the electors decided the actual winner of the election.

As usual, however, the framers omitted the process to be followed in case of dispute. In particular, they did not specify that the Supreme Court, an unelected body of judges who held lifetime appointments, should not determine the outcomes of elections. In 2000 this led to the election of a president by five such judges after 200 million citizens had cast their votes in the general election. Furthermore, all five of these judges had affiliations to the Republican party, whose candidate they chose as the winner. These judges showed no reluctance to support their party's candidate, despite the express intent of the framers to lift the Supreme Court justices above the fray of electoral politics by giving them lifetime tenure.

Over the years, the citizens of the US became concerned about the influence of corporations and large political contributions. The Congress, responding to the will of the people, passed laws that regulated contributions from corporations. In Citizens United v FEC, the Supreme Court ruled that the concerns of the people were groundless. The Court ruled that corporations were nothing more than associations of individuals and as such were entitled to the same rights as individuals under the First Amendment.

This ruling supported the Court's belief that the rich had more rights to express their opinions, since it is obvious to everyone that the rich can buy more speech than the poor. The Court delared that there cannot be too much speech. Through this ruling, the court overruled the people of the United States, whose common sense tells them that corporations spending vast amounts of money wield inordinate influence over politicians and their decisions.

In Citizens United, the Court once again found a way to support the Republican party. They voted five to four along party lines to permit unlimited corporate contributions. Many groups have been proposed that an amendment to the constitution would resolve this issue. The impartiality of the supreme court is fundamental to the design of the Constitution. The framers designed the Constitution to operate by checks and balances. Without an unbiased Supreme Court, their design fails.

The Constitution conceals this flaw and many others. The framers intended the Constitution to be amendable, yet only 17 amendments have been enacted, other than the Bill of Rights, in over 200 years. There are several reasons for this failure of the original design.

1. The United States has many more states than it had originally. When there were only 13 states, the number of legislatures required to ratify an amendment was 10. Today, when ratification requires the approval of 38 state legislatures, the amendment process should be at least 3 1/2 times as difficult.
2. The population of the United States is more than 100 times what it was in 1787. Persuading a number of people of the necessity of a change increases with the number of people who must be convinced. The people do not directly vote to ratify amendments, but they do vote for the legislators who must make the decision.
3. Both the larger number of states and the larger population make the amendment process more time-consuming.
4. The increase in time and energy, and above all money, that can be spent to defeat an amendment makes it unlikely that an issue can achieve a 3/4 approval. Money can be spent liberally to confuse the issues. Confusion will make the amendment less likely to pass.
5. The vast amount of money that must be raised to ratify an amendment will make it difficult to pass a complex amendment, such as one that abolishes the Electoral College.

Numerous amendments have been proposed to overturn the Citizens United decision. The opponents of this decision correctly view it as a threat to democracy itself. All of these amendments, however, share a common flaw. These amendments seek to correct a single decision of the Supreme Court, but history has shown that the enemies of democracy will soon find another way to suppress the rights of the people. Given the impediments blocking any Constitutional Amendment and the large errors and oversights in the Constitution itself, there is only one solution. The amendment process itself, as described in Article V of the Constitution, must be changed.

The change required is simple. The Constitution must be amended by referendum and initiative, using the same process as already exists in many states. Such an amendment, known as the National Initiative, has already been proposed.

The existing initiative and referendum laws were proposed during the Progressive Era (1890 – 1930). At that time, people were concerned that big corporations were controlling state legislatures. Corporations are once again threatening our democracy. We need the National Initiative, the Silver Bullet that can rectify many of the Constitutions problems and return the government to its rightful owners, the People.

George Will doesn't understand Science

George Will has no business criticizing scientific theories. He is an intelligent man, even brilliant at times, but his training and inclinations are religious and philosophical, not scientific. He has two major flaws that disqualify him from commenting on science.

First, Will brings to any subject a raft of opinions and prejudices. He formulates his ideas based on rigid philosophies, primarily conservatism and libertarianism. This sort of thinking is anathema to science. A scientist must be ready to modify her views based on new information.

For example, Will wrote convincingly that the filibuster was a good thing when Republicans used it against Clinton in 1992. But he condemned the filibuster when the Democrats used it in 2003. In this instance, as in many others, Will formed his conclusion first, then used his writing skills to argue for the position he already supported, namely that conservatism is good and liberalism is bad.

Second, Will resorts to cheap rhetorical tricks in his arguments. Will cited an Arctic Climate Research Center report in 2006 that stated that global sea ice levels were equal to those of 1979. He chose not to cite the next sentence from that report, which stated that Northern Hemisphere sea ice levels were one million square kilometers lower than 1979. He also failed to investigate further by contacting the Center and asking for clarification. The Center categorically denied the story.

This illustrates the rhetorical trick of cherry picking, where an author uses data that supports his position and ignores data that does not. This is a critical error is scientific argument, where data that fail to support a theory are precisely the ones which must be explained. All the data must be accounted for.

Will famously proclaimed the cause of record-breaking temperatures was summer, not global warming. He continued his argument by claiming that summers had always been hot, even when he was a child. This is an example of a straw man argument. No reputable scientist claimed that the temperatures were caused by global warming, but Will proposed that they had, then attacked their non-existent claims.

Will treats scientific theories as if they are political policies and attacks them as such. He attacks global warming because he considers it a progressive policy and because he, as a conservative, has a duty to attack all things progressive. Whether progressives or conservatives accept global warming is irrelevant to whether the theory is true or false.

Critics of scientific theories must approach their topic with an understanding of science and abandon political bias.