Best Constitutional Amendment

[Gori the Grey]

So I guess you've conceded that I am raising valid points but you have no interest in seriously considering them because we are all here to pat ourselves on the back for paying attention in high school civics

RIP CFCOT

I concede no such thing.

CFCOT is dead. Long live CFCOT.

 

[Camikaze]

Rights don't require something to be "good policy." It's a right, not an efficiency or convenience or a mercy or a competitive advantage. It may be those things, or it may not be. They're besides the point. Right up until you can pass the constitutional hurdles for removing it. Presumably through amendment, but more likely through rich old people reinterpreting old news. Since that's significantly easier.

All of that can be subsumed within the 'good policy' question. You can say within a policy discussion that no gun control should ever be entertained, because there is a right to have as many guns of any type as one pleases. But instead of that rights claim just resting upon the interpretation of the 2nd amendment, it competes within a policy space. This works both ways. Imagine that the 2nd amendment were interpreted to only allow registered militia members to have guns. The question would still be whether there is an inalienable 'right' to have a gun. You wouldn't say, "well if that's what the 2nd amendment says, I guess it's fine". You would say, "sure, the 2nd amendment only guarantees very limited gun access, but we nonetheless have a broader right that should be respected". Realistically, you'd probably also challenge the interpretation of the 2nd amendment, but only because that's the easiest way to trump policy arguments, and not because you'd be conceding that the right in question must be precisely coexistence with the 2nd amendment. It may well be that the right in question is so underappreciated in society that, if the 2nd amendment were not there to protect it, it would be routinely infringed. This would probably make the 2nd amendment an important amendment. But it's also possible that support for gun rights is so high and ingrained that the 2nd amendment isn't actually all that necessary to prevent legislatures from removing gun rights. In that case, the 2nd amendment wouldn't have all that much importance. A better example of that might be the 19th amendment. What work does it have to do? Can it be the 'best' amendment if it's functionally redundant?

As it is, it would be a massive coincidence, if the 'right' of which you speak is exactly reflected by the prevailing legal interpretation of the 2nd amendment. And even if it were, the right would still have an independent existence - the 2nd amendment could then just be praised for capturing it well.

 

[civvver]

Without the first amendment none of the others would be possible. It's basically a right to speak out against the government, a right against censorship. How do you think abolition of slavery and civil rights movement and women's right to vote came around? Because a bunch of people exercised their first amendment rights and got enough people to listen and changed minds and got stuff done. If the first amendment hadn't been there to protect them they could've all been rounded up and sent to prison (well a bunch were, but it could've been even worse), or censored even more so etc.

 

[sophie]

Without the first amendment none of the others would be possible. It's basically a right to speak out against the government, a right against censorship. How do you think abolition of slavery and civil rights movement and women's right to vote came around? Because a bunch of people exercised their first amendment rights and got enough people to listen and changed minds and got stuff done. If the first amendment hadn't been there to protect them they could've all been rounded up and sent to prison (well a bunch were, but it could've been even worse), or censored even more so etc.

Or enslaved?

 

[Commodore]

when you look at the Amendments in isolation, XXI becomes in effect a legalization of alcohol, which definitely makes it one of the better amendments

Not only did it legalize alcohol, it established that drinking alcohol is a fundamental right of all Americans.

 

[timtofly]

Without the first amendment none of the others would be possible. It's basically a right to speak out against the government, a right against censorship. How do you think abolition of slavery and civil rights movement and women's right to vote came around? Because a bunch of people exercised their first amendment rights and got enough people to listen and changed minds and got stuff done. If the first amendment hadn't been there to protect them they could've all been rounded up and sent to prison (well a bunch were, but it could've been even worse), or censored even more so etc.

I think that Camikaze is trying to point out that the 2nd amendment was there to "enforce" the 1st.

The difference between the US and Australia though would be that if the writers had been less concerned about the economy and more concerned about rights in general, they would have afforded all humans in the US to the right of citizenship in the 1st amendment. The 2nd amendment may have never been necessary. There was a human right violation going on, and it silently predominated the whole nation for years. I would say that today, the same issue has been silently brewing in the economy of millions of immigrants, who while not thought of as slaves, still gives the same notion of critical economic proportions.

Sometimes things need to happen no matter the economic fatality, else living with slow progression only compounds the problem instead of solving it.

I disagree that the 1st amendment is or can be implied by any of the rest. For some reason, it has been more to the point that in the US, some if not all of the amendments have narrowed down or defined the 1st, and thus making it weak, but not necessarily superfluous.

But even freedom of expression is not really freedom of opinion, because no written document is going to protect one's feelings. We have the right to have our feelings hurt and very deeply. It is not logical to have it any other way. Life is the process of getting through that right in one piece and that is the pursuit of happiness.... and the 21st....for those who need some extraneous physical push.

 

[Lexicus]

The 13th Amendment, by a long shot. It did more to advance the cause of freedom and justice than any other Amendment.

 

[Lohrenswald]

Who is the freedom-hater that voted ammendment 3

 

[EgonSpengler]

The 13th Amendment, by a long shot. It did more to advance the cause of freedom and justice than any other Amendment.

I understand this sentiment - surely no liberal democracy can exist with such mistreatment of people at its core - but specific to the United States, our 13th Amendment is (a) kind of mea culpa that we shouldn't really have needed in the first place, and (b) an incomplete effort. Jim Crow Laws didn't even come about until later, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act was necessary because even 100 years later we were still being [stuff]heads. Sorry, but I'm not really patting myself on the back for the 13th. It's embarrassing that we even needed it in the first place, and here we are a century-and-a-half later, with robot cars and organ transplants and stuff, and a former Grand Dragon of the KKK is running for Senate.

 

[classical_hero]

Fourteenth, without a doubt. The whole concept of "equal protection under the law" is powerful and easy to extend to new arguments as they arise. It's basically how civil rights are established and extended. Also, establishing that the rights given to citizens under the Constitution apply to states as well as the federal government is really critical.

But if you look at amendments 15 and 19, they are votes for all regardless of skin colour and gender. Does that mean that voting isn't a civil right?

 

[JollyRoger]

Corporations can't vote yet, so no.

 

[shadowplay]

I chose the 19th because I don't know how a country can call itself a democracy if more than half the citizens lack a say in the process.

 

[Quintillus]

Voted for the 4th, although if asked a different night I may have chosen a different one. For pretty much the same reasons as Farm Boy stated in post #36.

It's a peculiar form of American constitutionalism, which ignores empirical evidence from elsewhere in the western world, to assume that you can't have a legal right without a constitutional guarantee.

The benefit of the Constitution is that it makes it much more difficult for those in power in the government at any time to remove the rights enshrined in it. While that may seem unlikely to occur for many of these rights today (would the government really decide to allow slavery again or proclaim an official religion? highly unlikely), this was not such a sure thing in the late 1700s where most of Europe was still ruled by monarchies that could restrict rights at the whim of the monarch, or even at best at the whim of the parties currently in control of Parliament. And the rise of fascism in the early 1900s showed that legal rights could quickly be eroded; you could argue that Putin has been doing essentially the same thing with freedom of the press over the past 10 years. By having it in the Constitution, the threshold to legally repeal the right (passage by 3/4ths of states, in short) is much higher, and there's legal recourse if the right is being illegally restricted in the meantime.

No one seriously believes humankind could ever do better than the American Constitution, the best framework for government ever invented.

You're welcome to propose a better alternative, and it's possible that there is a more recent governing document out there that is better but not as well known. I agree that the government is at times not very good at following its own regulations, but I do not think the Constitution or its amendments is the cause of that. Perhaps it could be enhanced to help better protect against government abuses, but on the whole I think it's prevented far more of those than would have occurred without it enshrining any rights.

I would argue that the larger problem is not the existence of the amendments, but insufficient respect for them in society in general, and in certain government agencies in particular.