Rubio: Amend the U.S. Constitution
- Thread starter cigaretteman
- Start date
The mob is just as stupid as it was 200 years ago. Probably more so.
See I disagree, there is the tyranny of the majority, if there wasn't the SCOTUS would be really freaking boring and no one would care.
I don't see what you are talking about as the tyranny of the minority though. See nothing stops these groups of people from enacting whatever laws they like within their own states. Taking away the senate allows those people to start enacting laws on other people who don't want those laws.
I hate to use the state's rights argument because it's overused and misapplied so I'll change it to what Christian Democrats call "The lowest competent authority" The lowest competent authority needs to take charge of many of these things not put them all on the fed. Because what works in New York City doesn't work in rural America and vice versa. What you are suggesting is to basically let people in places like NYC who have honestly no freaking idea what living in rural America is like start making decisions for rural America. That's a bad plan
On top of that it doesn't at all prevent other things, things that could be totally constitutional from happening. For example when 9 states or 9 groups of closely packed districts realize they have all the power in government, what's to stop them from taking what they want from everyone else? Indiana send us limestone, no we arn't gonna pay for it, it's "for the good of the country", Iowa send us corn for free "for the good of the country", West Virginia send us coal "for the good of the country", Alaska and North Dakota your oil please "it's for the good of the country".
It won't take long before those 9 powerful states look like the capital and the other 41 states start looking like District 12.
Lower competent authorities are better able to run things in their area then the federal government is from afar. I hate the state's rights argument because of how misused it is but there is good reason to let a lot of your every day government be handed by the states and not the fed. Sure the political boundaries are somewhat arbitrary but eventually if you allow local government you are gonna have arbitrary boundaries somewhere. And the people in a particular place need to feel that they have some measure of self rule.
Just like the American colonies objected violently to the rule of an empire centered across the ocean, having people who live thousands of miles away from you make all the decisions for you is a recipe for more problems and violence.
Try to take away the states and/or take way the senate and the union shatters. People in places like California, Texas, New York and Florida are not very good people to be making decisions for Iowans or Hoosiers. A simple example. . . California, Texas and Florida have little understanding of the snowfall here, especially in my case around the lakes. That's a lot of representatives who have quite possibly only seen snow while on vacation once or maybe they saw an inch of snow falling and they shut down the entire state making decisions on how much to budget and how many trucks and employee's we need for snow removal.
My mother in law is from the South and tries to buy me "winter coats" that I end up only wearing in the spring. You could had her a scraper and show her a frosted car window and she would say "Ok what do I do next?" For her part my wife has adapted to winters here but before we got married she saw snowfall here and was shocked that everyone wasn't out playing in the snow. See where she comes from not only does snowfall shut down the state but everyone adults and children runs out and plays. These arn't the people you want making sure that your streets get plowed.
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I completely accept that its not a practical plan that people would rush to embrace. But that's not the spirit in which it was suggested. We were imagining a more perfect society and in that spirit there is no need for states. Its not actually true in my opinion that state government produces better results. From civil rights, to education to the environment the nation is forever having to fix failures that individual states let slide. Eliminating states doesn't mean eliminating local government nor does it mean there couldn't be local administration. It simply means we don't have 50 different plans for every common function. It would be a more fair and efficient way to structure a nation.
I disagree entirely that it would be better. The more influence someone a thousand miles away has on a person's daily life, the more they start to resent it.
Even European nations far smaller in size and geography then the US have administrative divisions comparable to our states in many ways.
Having people who can't drive in 2 inches of snow from places a thousand miles away making decisions that affect my daily living in Northern Indiana is not something that I see as ideal in any way.
Not the least of which is their ability as the majority to tap into the local natural resources for their own benefit. Every congressman wants to bring home the bacon and there is no reason that given enough time to form a coalition that those 9 states (or 9 closely packed districts) can't decide to start sapping the natural resources and money from the rest of the 41 states for their own benefit so that they end up looking like the Capital and the rest of us look like district 12.
That thought bothers me so much that I'd much prefer putting up with my state's flat tax and regressive sales tax.
I get sometimes the states have failed their people. Civil rights is a very big example of this. But a large federal government that has representatives concentrated in 9 areas that can formulate a majority and dictate life in the other 80% of the country (by land size) is not ideal. Its something that I not only see that would cause a civil war but something that would make me consider joining the rebels as well. And remember I'm the person that think's that Lincoln failed the country by not wanting to punish the rebel ringleaders. I also think the American revolution was a little on the hot headed side. I don't tend towards rebellion, but it wouldn't take many edicts from afar for me to sign up for it.
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Let me deal with this in reverse order. The claim that land should be represented over people is exactly the problem I'm trying to solve in this thought experiment. Your threat of civil war in favor of land seems quite an odd value statement IMO. But if we are going to run down that hypothetical hair on fire hole, its people that revolt, not property. If you fear civil war, then you should be for shifting power to the people.
Your point on administrative centers being like states isn't obvious to me at all. I'm for local administration. But that doesn't mean we need 50 autonomous duplications of every function and zone of regulation. Its not clear at all that a person's ability to drive in snow is necessary to formulate a sound policy on drinking water safety standards as an example. Nor is it clear that people in different parts of the nation require different standards for their water to be safe. Similar thinking applies to most everything government does. People's needs just aren't that special or unique but it should be people's needs we focus on, not land size as you suggest.
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Campaigning for president requires one to come up with policy proposals, a need that from time to time produces innovative and promising ideas. But it also produces some extraordinarily dumb ones, as Marco Rubio is now demonstrating. Here’s his latest plan to fix what’s wrong with Washington:
Shortly after 11 a.m. on the East Coast, Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign alerted the media to their candidate’s latest position, inspired by the Founding Fathers and by Congress’s seeming inability to pass conservative legislation.
“One of the things I’m going to do on my first day is office is I will put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states,” Rubio said as he campaigned in Iowa. “You know why? Because that is the only way that we are ever going to get term limits on members of Congress or the judiciary and that is the only way we are ever going to get a balanced-budget amendment.”
With this, Rubio manages to combine a promise for something that will never happen with a spectacularly terrible idea.
We’ll start with the constitutional convention. There are two ways an amendment to the Constitution can be proposed: when two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to do so, or when two-thirds of the states call for a convention to propose amendments. Rubio is saying that because you couldn’t get super-majorities in Congress to support his three ideas, he wants to push for the states to assemble a convention to offer these amendments.
The first thing to understand is that the president has nothing to do with this process. What Rubio is promising is that in between trying to pass his tax cuts and outlaw abortion and repeal Obamacare and wage war on the Islamic State, he’ll use the bully pulpit to advocate for a constitutional convention. So President Rubio will give a speech or two about it? Mention it in the State of the Union? That’s fine, but at best it might bring the chances of getting two-thirds of the states to sign on from approximately zero to ever slightly more than zero. Getting a constitutional convention might be a bit easier than assembling two-thirds majorities in Congress, but not by much.
So he can’t make these constitutional amendments happen. But what about the amendments themselves? Term limits for judges is the only one that might not be all that problematic, but it’s a little hard to tell what the problem is that Rubio is trying to solve. Lifetime tenure for judges is supposed to insulate them from momentary political concerns, but in practice it turns out that there’s plenty of politics on the bench. Presidents pick nominees they hope will reflect their own political values, and most of the time they’re right, with an occasional exception here and there. Some have suggested that the Supreme Court could use more turnover, so there should be a limit of some long but not endless stretch for justices (18 years is one common number). That might be fine, but it’s hard to see what kind of transformation in American justice would result from limiting all federal judges’ terms. If anything, the nominating and confirmation process would become even more political, since you’d need more judges.
But that’s the least bad of these ideas. The next is term limits for Congress, an idea that fell out of favor for a while and Rubio now wants to bring back. But what is it supposed to accomplish? Is Washington going to run more smoothly with more members who don’t know how to pass legislation? We’ve seen a huge influx of new members (mostly Republicans) in the last few congressional elections, and they haven’t exactly been committed to making government work. To the contrary, they’re the ones who care least about having a functioning government and are more likely to be nihilistic extremists who want to shut down the government, default on the national debt and govern by crisis.
Rubio is smart enough to know that the myth of the citizen legislator unsullied by contact with sinister lobbyists, who comes to Washington armed with nothing but common sense and a strong moral fiber and cleans up government, is just that — a myth. But he also knows that saying “Kick all the bums out!” is an easy way to pander to voters’ most simplistic and uninformed impulses.
I’ve saved the worst for last: a balanced-budget amendment. It has long been a popular item on the conservative wish list, but if you put it into practice, it would be an absolute disaster.
The childish way of thinking about it is that a requirement that the government spend no more than it takes in every year would impose fiscal discipline and make government live within its means. But in truth it would require radical cutbacks in everything government does — which means not only the programs Republicans don’t like anyway, but also the ones they do like. In the last half century, through Republican and Democratic presidencies and Republican and Democratic Congresses, we’ve had only five years when the government’s budget was balanced (four of which came during the boom of the Clinton years). Without the ability to issue bonds to cover each year’s shortfall, we’d be left without the ability to do what’s necessary to serve all of our many public needs.
Consider what would happen during an economic downturn if we had a balanced-budget amendment. What you want in that situation is for government to step in and help people — by providing things like food stamps and unemployment compensation to keep people from falling into truly desperate situations of hunger and homelessness, and also to do what it can to spur job creation and keep the recession from being worse than it would otherwise be.
But in a recession, tax revenue also falls, because people are losing jobs and incomes are plummeting; as an example, between 2008 and 2009, the federal government’s revenues declined by more than $400 billion. With a balanced-budget requirement in place, just at the moment when government’s help is needed most, not only would it be powerless to do anything to mitigate the toll of the recession, it also would be required to impose brutal budget cuts, pulling money out of the economy and making things even worse. If Rubio got his way, every recession the country experienced would be deeper, longer and more punishing.
Some conservatives say, “Nearly every state has a balanced-budget amendment, so why can’t the federal government have one too?” But that’s actually another reason why a federal balanced-budget amendment would be so dangerous. When a recession hits, states have no choice but to cut back, slashing needed services and firing workers just when their economies are suffering. At those times, the federal government can step in to limit the damage, boosting the hundreds of billions of dollars it already provides in aid to the states. As it happens, many of the states run by Republicans are the ones most dependent on federal government aid. In 2012, according to the Tax Foundation, the federal government picked up 31.5 percent of all state budgets, including 44 percent of Louisiana’s, 45 percent of Mississippi’s and 41 percent of Tennessee’s. So in places where Republicans are denouncing the federal government in the loudest terms, without the federal government’s help their state finances would utterly collapse.
The good news is that none of what Rubio is advocating for will ever happen. But advocating for constitutional amendments is what you do when you don’t have the stomach for actual governing. It’s certainly seductive — we’ll just change the Constitution, and that will sweep away all the messiness that comes with politics. But it’s a fantasy. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of presidential candidates who don’t respect the voters enough to tell them that passing laws and solving problems is difficult and complicated, and to get what you want to you have to slog your way through it. That’s not an inspiring campaign message, but it’s the truth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/12/31/marco-rubios-terrible-new-idea/
Shortly after 11 a.m. on the East Coast, Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign alerted the media to their candidate’s latest position, inspired by the Founding Fathers and by Congress’s seeming inability to pass conservative legislation.
“One of the things I’m going to do on my first day is office is I will put the prestige and power of the presidency behind a constitutional convention of the states,” Rubio said as he campaigned in Iowa. “You know why? Because that is the only way that we are ever going to get term limits on members of Congress or the judiciary and that is the only way we are ever going to get a balanced-budget amendment.”
With this, Rubio manages to combine a promise for something that will never happen with a spectacularly terrible idea.
We’ll start with the constitutional convention. There are two ways an amendment to the Constitution can be proposed: when two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to do so, or when two-thirds of the states call for a convention to propose amendments. Rubio is saying that because you couldn’t get super-majorities in Congress to support his three ideas, he wants to push for the states to assemble a convention to offer these amendments.
The first thing to understand is that the president has nothing to do with this process. What Rubio is promising is that in between trying to pass his tax cuts and outlaw abortion and repeal Obamacare and wage war on the Islamic State, he’ll use the bully pulpit to advocate for a constitutional convention. So President Rubio will give a speech or two about it? Mention it in the State of the Union? That’s fine, but at best it might bring the chances of getting two-thirds of the states to sign on from approximately zero to ever slightly more than zero. Getting a constitutional convention might be a bit easier than assembling two-thirds majorities in Congress, but not by much.
So he can’t make these constitutional amendments happen. But what about the amendments themselves? Term limits for judges is the only one that might not be all that problematic, but it’s a little hard to tell what the problem is that Rubio is trying to solve. Lifetime tenure for judges is supposed to insulate them from momentary political concerns, but in practice it turns out that there’s plenty of politics on the bench. Presidents pick nominees they hope will reflect their own political values, and most of the time they’re right, with an occasional exception here and there. Some have suggested that the Supreme Court could use more turnover, so there should be a limit of some long but not endless stretch for justices (18 years is one common number). That might be fine, but it’s hard to see what kind of transformation in American justice would result from limiting all federal judges’ terms. If anything, the nominating and confirmation process would become even more political, since you’d need more judges.
But that’s the least bad of these ideas. The next is term limits for Congress, an idea that fell out of favor for a while and Rubio now wants to bring back. But what is it supposed to accomplish? Is Washington going to run more smoothly with more members who don’t know how to pass legislation? We’ve seen a huge influx of new members (mostly Republicans) in the last few congressional elections, and they haven’t exactly been committed to making government work. To the contrary, they’re the ones who care least about having a functioning government and are more likely to be nihilistic extremists who want to shut down the government, default on the national debt and govern by crisis.
Rubio is smart enough to know that the myth of the citizen legislator unsullied by contact with sinister lobbyists, who comes to Washington armed with nothing but common sense and a strong moral fiber and cleans up government, is just that — a myth. But he also knows that saying “Kick all the bums out!” is an easy way to pander to voters’ most simplistic and uninformed impulses.
I’ve saved the worst for last: a balanced-budget amendment. It has long been a popular item on the conservative wish list, but if you put it into practice, it would be an absolute disaster.
The childish way of thinking about it is that a requirement that the government spend no more than it takes in every year would impose fiscal discipline and make government live within its means. But in truth it would require radical cutbacks in everything government does — which means not only the programs Republicans don’t like anyway, but also the ones they do like. In the last half century, through Republican and Democratic presidencies and Republican and Democratic Congresses, we’ve had only five years when the government’s budget was balanced (four of which came during the boom of the Clinton years). Without the ability to issue bonds to cover each year’s shortfall, we’d be left without the ability to do what’s necessary to serve all of our many public needs.
Consider what would happen during an economic downturn if we had a balanced-budget amendment. What you want in that situation is for government to step in and help people — by providing things like food stamps and unemployment compensation to keep people from falling into truly desperate situations of hunger and homelessness, and also to do what it can to spur job creation and keep the recession from being worse than it would otherwise be.
But in a recession, tax revenue also falls, because people are losing jobs and incomes are plummeting; as an example, between 2008 and 2009, the federal government’s revenues declined by more than $400 billion. With a balanced-budget requirement in place, just at the moment when government’s help is needed most, not only would it be powerless to do anything to mitigate the toll of the recession, it also would be required to impose brutal budget cuts, pulling money out of the economy and making things even worse. If Rubio got his way, every recession the country experienced would be deeper, longer and more punishing.
Some conservatives say, “Nearly every state has a balanced-budget amendment, so why can’t the federal government have one too?” But that’s actually another reason why a federal balanced-budget amendment would be so dangerous. When a recession hits, states have no choice but to cut back, slashing needed services and firing workers just when their economies are suffering. At those times, the federal government can step in to limit the damage, boosting the hundreds of billions of dollars it already provides in aid to the states. As it happens, many of the states run by Republicans are the ones most dependent on federal government aid. In 2012, according to the Tax Foundation, the federal government picked up 31.5 percent of all state budgets, including 44 percent of Louisiana’s, 45 percent of Mississippi’s and 41 percent of Tennessee’s. So in places where Republicans are denouncing the federal government in the loudest terms, without the federal government’s help their state finances would utterly collapse.
The good news is that none of what Rubio is advocating for will ever happen. But advocating for constitutional amendments is what you do when you don’t have the stomach for actual governing. It’s certainly seductive — we’ll just change the Constitution, and that will sweep away all the messiness that comes with politics. But it’s a fantasy. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of presidential candidates who don’t respect the voters enough to tell them that passing laws and solving problems is difficult and complicated, and to get what you want to you have to slog your way through it. That’s not an inspiring campaign message, but it’s the truth.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/12/31/marco-rubios-terrible-new-idea/
But the way those needs are handled depends a lot upon where they live. Everyone needs quality water but the source of that water is different. If it wasn't why is half of California in a drought while where I live everyone with a basement has to have a sump pump because of how high the water table is. We all need roads in good conditions but the conditions necessary to maintain that are different depending on where you live. We all need protection from danger but again the way that is accomplished is different. The work the Alaska State troopers is do is probably significantly different from the Florida state troopers or the New York State troopers.
All of this is based upon where you live. And some group in Washington DC a majority of which come from places no where near you is suppose to be responsible for arranging for your needs.
It won't work.
These aren't arguments for states. They are arguments for local administration on which we both agree. The fact that water tables vary, even within a city doesn't mean you need different spheres of government to deal with each condition. If you want to argue for states you will need to present arguments for why land should have rights over people.
Says the guy that scoffs at the idea that our mounting debt is no problem at all, because PK told him so.
Well then there are a lot of posters on this board that were short on credibility.
I won't argue that point, but I honestly don't recall anyone ever making the case that Clinton eliminated the debt. It was always about the deficit. People often confuse those terms, but no one who grasped their correct meaning was pulling data to show the debt was gone.
Most? Hmmm. Not sure most is accurate. Most people that I know are pro traditional marriage, but don't believe that gay marriage should be prevented. Maybe I just hang out with a good crowd, but that's the way I see it.
Just like the police situation. There are good cops and bad cops. The good cops far out weigh the bad cops. But the bad cops are dominating the headlines because it's good for ratings. You don't hear about the good cops going about their day to day tasks doing what they're supposed to do.
Or Muslims? We keep hearing that the vast majority of Muslims are good people, but we rarely see that side because the bad ones boost the ratings.
Same with pro traditional marriage folks. They believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman. The ones that think gay marriage should be prevented are the outspoken ones that grab the headlines and boost ratings. But as I said, most of the ones I know are not anti-gay marriage.
I have a different perspective. When I encounter people like your friends who support both traditional and SSM, I don't see them trumpeting the cause of traditional marriage. When I see people making a point of supporting traditional marriage, those people almost without exception are stating that position as a way of expressing opposition to SSM. There is a reason they go to the effort to add the word tradional, it's because they want to exclude some from the franchise. People who support both, simply call it marriage.
Well, that's too bad. Those aren't good people in my opinion.
Question, do you think Obama still believes marriage is between one man and one woman?
The important distinction is whether they think traditional marriage is fine - which is nearly everybody - vs whether they SAY they are pro traditional marriage. Most of those who go out of their way to volunteer that they are pro traditional marriage seem to have an anti gay marriage agenda.
We see this same formula in other arenas. Most of us are perfectly OK if people want to practice abstinence, for example. But those who go out of their way to advocate abstinence usually want that instead of safe sex options.
I think demonstrably not. And that's where I like to focus my attention, on actions.
I'm not sure I would describe those who disagree with me about gay equality as "not good people". That gets tricky. I think they are wrong. I think their positions are dangerous to me personally and I oppose them. But I'm not sure their positions come from a place of evil necessarily. I think there is a great deal of ignorance that plays out around this topic.
But as I said, most people I know that believe marriage "should be" between one man and one woman, are not in favor of the government (local or federal) standing in the way of SSM. And that's because the people I'm talking about are a live and let live type of people. That doesn't mean they cannot have different beliefs.
I doubt that. I give him no credit or admonishment about his motives. I only care that policy changed.
I asked the question because I wonder if he's one of those people that I'm describing. Believes in "traditional" marriage as being one man and one woman, but, in his case, pushing for change vs not wanting Government to prevent SSM.
I'm open to that possibility. I just don't think the people you describe who may include BHO are the same crowd I'm describing as those who are trumpeting traditional marriage.
I agree with you that they are out there, and there are a lot of them. Just don't know if they represent "most" of them.
There needs to be another level of authority more competent and powerful then the local authorities yet closer to the local situations then federal authorities. Hence you have states.
I don't disagree that we could use another constitutional convention. However, we need it to make amendments to overturn citizens united, ensure fair districts for congressional seats and end gerrymandering, and specify everyone's right to adequate health care.
That's not obvious either, but even that authority need not have representation rights. Devolve representation to the people, the authority to administer could remain. It made sense in the beginning why you would grant independant nations some level of sovereignty to get them to join into one confederation. That model is no longer relevant and hasn't been for over a century, arguably more. What reason do we have for giving equal representation to blocks of land when doing so restricts the will of the people?
Again the tyranny of the majority. What reason do we have for not sending all of Iowa's Corn, Indiana's Limestone, West Virgina's Coal, and Alaska and North Dakota's oil to all the populated places without compensating them. . . For the good of the country.
What reason do lesser populated places get federal assistance dollars not just in terms of welfare and entitlements but also money to help build infrastructure?
I'm sorry but I honestly think if you drop the senate then the populated places are going to be the capital and the rest of the country is going to be District 12.
I think your first concern has more to do with capitalism and respect for private property and the need to pay for goods than it does for states rights. Most of the rest of the world isn't organized into states and yet your harms are not realized. Federal assistance in your second point flows because people have rights, even in small numbers in remote locations, not because the land has rights. There's a lot of inequality when it comes to federal assistance now. If we made federal assistance based on individual circumstances rather than the state you live in, its likely that system would be much more equitable.
You have no reason to apologize. Clearly states are going to continue to exist in reality. I'm just making the case that they exist mainly for ill considered sentimental reasons that boil down to rights for land over rights for people. We could achieve every advantage smaller administrative districts achieve while returning more power to the people and saving resources if we simply removed States from the hierarchy.
Huh? Almost all countries have states or provinces (or some other name for it) with varying degrees of sovereignty.
http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/countrydivision.htm
We covered this already. Administrative districts is what I'm for which would be different from sovereign states with voting rights granted to the land.
Federal assistance for infrastructure comes from Senators and Reps using their influence to bring the money in. Without senators, the reps would have no power with which to bring any money in.
Plus I believe it's much better to let people in a region set their own laws and punishments rather then having the fed dictate them.
One good reason to preserve states is that it promotes diversity. Some people feel they can thrive and achieve happiness in California; some feel most welcome and accepted in Texas. Cultural diversity is a good thing because it allows people the maximum opportunity to live among those that share their priorities and beliefs.
Strict government by the majority in the USA would resemble tyranny with almost all power centered in the worst possible hands - the large metropolitan political machines.
The first point may be how it was intended to work, but conservatives sure don't like that method of pork patronage and are always blasting this method. Its hardly the only option, but this might be a good reason to give rights to the land. Just admit you are doing this so that people in Iowa can legally take disproportionately from the people in California. Now does that still seem fair?
How is your second position just? If I commit the same crime a few feet away, why should I get different levels of justice according to geography? People should set laws and punishments, but we should do this as a consensus throughout the land. What is just and Indiana should be the same as what is just in Arizona.
As opposed to the reverse which we have now where the poor and especially the urban poor live so well?
Have you seen our cities?
No one is talking about strict government by the majority here. We are talking about simply removing the Senate and stop granting the land a right to vote so that the people can have more influence. All the minority rights are still protected by the same statutory means they are now.
Diversity in culture is really outside the realm of government bureaucracy I'd argue. And for removing the government as a source of cultural identity, you gain assimilation and unity all while granting the people more rights and money in the bank.
You could use the same argument against nations having their own laws. Why not just make a worldwide set of laws? Wouldn't you love for your vote on justice to count as much as a middle easterner who thinks people should be punished by the law for fornication?
What is just is determined by the community there. And different groups have different cultures and views about justice. Things that seem to us to be entirely unjust to others are very just and vice versa. While our culture on justice around the country isn't so different is it is between here and the middle east, it's worthwhile to note the differences. Some people in certain regions of the country find the death penalty to be a barbaric practice while other people in other regions of the country believe it should be the ordinary punishment for the worst crimes.
You have too much faith in "the people." Pure democracy is just as sucky as pure capitalism.
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