this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2023
309 points (98.1% liked)
United States | News & Politics
1935 readers
124 users here now
Welcome to !usa@midwest.social, where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is that the US system is old and outdated, buggy as fuck, and was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change because that was what was necessary in order to get the slave states to join the union.
As for our measurements, we actually use a mix. In the military, science and engineering where it matters, we use metric. In everything else we use a kind of hybrid imperial system that in a lot of ways (not all) is much more intuitive than metric because it tends to be based on a human scale.
Cool.
So fix it.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You're doing the thing that I'm talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President's set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it'd be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic "so fix it" switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn't the case, but wishes aren't worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that's almost impossible to update because it's full of ancient proprietary software that doesn't play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.