It’s time to accept that the US supreme court is illegitimate and must be replaced | Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn
We need to remake the US high court so Americans don’t suffer future decades of oligarchy-facilitating rule
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The US needs to resume amending the constitution. That's been the historical recourse when the Supreme Court makes shitty decisions.
I think the absolute failure of the ERA has proven unequivocally that ratifying amendments to the Constitution are no longer possible in an age where mass media has broad and instant reach.
There will always be someone powerful who opposes any amendment to the Constitution. And they will always make themselves heard loudly around the world, thereby making a consensus completely impossible.
I think the absolute failure of the ERA has proven unequivocally that ratifying amendments to the Constitution are no longer possible in an age where mass media has broad and instant reach.
I don't see why not. Older amendments have gone unratified before. The longest spell between ratifications so far has been 61 years, and our last ratification was on 1992, so resuming now wouldn't break any records.
While ERA would have been a good one, we also have an older unratified amendment for regulating child labor. The only reason ERA can't be ratified is that congress started setting ratification deadlines, but that's never been necessary, and older proposals that don't have them can still be ratified.
I think part of the reluctance is that people unaware that constitutional originalism is a fairly new legal theory (first proposed in the 1970s) don't regard the constitution as a living document when it has been for most of history. They've come to see the US constitution as entirely up to the Supreme Court & forgotten that the ultimate control is the people & their power to amend it.
It's not about the deadlines or the age of the amendments that have been proposed. The problem is that in our current media setup all it takes is one rich asshole who doesn't like an amendment to literally spam the entire world with propaganda against said amendment. And because the bar for ratification is so high it ends up being impossible.
I live in illinois. We've got a very liberal establishment here. But when we wanted to change our constitution to allow for a progressive income tax. One billionaire funneled millions of dollars into an ad campaign to shitcan the entire idea. And it worked.
The problem is that in our current media setup all it takes is one rich asshole who doesn’t like an amendment to literally spam the entire world with propaganda against said amendment.
That isn't new, and in the olden times, they thought their media of the time was also a threat to democracy. They had their tycoons then, too. As seen with political races like Mamdani's, wealth doesn't ultimately determine outcomes: the people still matter & have a mind of their own.
The people in Illinois were probably too apathetic or uninformed: laws don't sell themselves & activists need to advocate.
