1077
Biden worries ‘extreme’ supreme court can’t be relied on to uphold rule of law
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
1077 points (96.7% liked)
News
22625 readers
3596 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's really a shame that so many seem to be clinging to a constitution that is close to 250 years old. You would think that some things would need to be updated over that period of time, but as I said, I'm from Europe...
Our constitution has been updated. Our current constitution is from the 90s. It’s just we update it in pain in the ass bits and pieces
Of course, I am aware that the U.S. Constitution has been updated several times and that any changes are a difficult political process (this is the case in every democratic country). From a European point of view, it is just difficult to understand why, for example, majority voting has still not been introduced and so on. In our system, it is unthinkable that votes are effectively devalued because the majority in one state disagrees. I understand, of course, that that was necessary some 250 years ago, so that electors could be sent to Washington to represent the will of the people of their particular state. But is that still in keeping with the times? To me, it seems antiquated - as does the attempt to guarantee independent constitutional judges by appointing them for life and thus - in theory - making them independent of political influence. I think that reality has shown that this is nothing but wishful thinking. Otherwise, a supreme justice like Clarence Thomas, who is obviously not only bound by his conscience, would probably no longer be in office. I just think that self-regulation has never really been effective - not in politics, law, or business.
One single office is elected with the Electoral College.
And? What's your point? We've had several presidents in the last, what 30-40 years, who lost the popular vote but got to be president anyway because we decided some states matter more than others.
The president? Isn't that the most important office that comes with a lot of power?
Keep moving those goalposts.
The president is in charge of managing the country, but he is beholden to the legislative and judicial branches. The president can't unilaterally do much.
How does the prime minister get elected in most countries? It's typically because the population elects a representative body, and that body elects a PM. Most countries do not directly elect a PM.
How do laws get passed in most countries. You elect a legislative branch and that legislative branch votes on laws.
The vast majority of even the most democratic countries do not directly vote on much, because nobody wants that.
That's true. But no votes are lost in the election of a prime minister. People usually elect a party and the parties with the most votes in turn elect the prime minister (via various detours depending on the country). The prime minister is thus elected through a majority system: The party with the most votes usually provides the prime minister. Gerrymandering or something like that is therefore not necessary. In the U.S., however, the president is not elected by majority (how many votes a candidate got in total), but by electoral college, which votes according to how the majority in a state voted. This results in your vote being devalued if it does not match the majority in the state you live in. Here's the difference: if you voted for a party to represent you, your vote would be counted even if you were in the minority in your home state. Under an electoral college system, that's not the case: your vote is irrelevant if you're in the minority in your home state. I can't make sense of this other than on historical grounds: I think it used to be that elections would be held in a state and then a representative of the state, an electoral college, would ride into Washington and vote in the presidential election as the majority in the state from which he came. That doesn't seem contemporary to me.
It makes more sense if you look at the United States as a group of individual entities with a Federal level that helps coordinate between them. It's more like the EU, and less like individual provinces.
Each state decides how to send its electors to vote for the president. Most of the states decided to send them as a winner take all batch of votes, but some decided to allow split votes.
It's not a perfect system by far, but it makes sense in the context of what it is.
That was the context at the start of the country, it's not really applicable anymore.
While most states work that way, Maine and Nebraska are not winner-take-all and have split their votes more proportionally.
I find it interesting that there are so many Europeans that have such strong opinions on the US, yet they don't keep themselves informed on the same.
The US Constitution has been updated many, many times since it was written.
I am aware of that. But essential things were obviously not changed at all. For example, in terms of majority voting. What speaks against it? Is there still a need for electors who have to ride to Washington on horseback?
The whole thing? Has the whole thing been looked at and revised? Or are you counting each and every amendment as an "update"? That's not an update to me. It's an addition that ignored the many flaws with the way we run our country.
It's literally how the constitution is changed. You make an amendment that changes the constitution. If you wanted to change the whole thing in a single amendment, you can do just that.
If you wanted to start from scratch and do the whole constitution over, you'd have the exact same set of steps to do that, unless it was done with an armed overthrow of the government. Then what you would have is a small group of people who ran that revolution would write a new constitution. And that would be unlikely to be any better than what is currently there.
How exactly do you think we would get a new constitution otherwise?
Sure, you're not wrong. That is a change. But I don't think that many people would call each and every amendment an update. If that's your argument, though, the constitution hasn't been updated in over fifty years. I'd say it's due for a change.