9 ms·

A bad grade that changed the U.S. constitution (2017)

160 points by igonvalue 5y ago

jawns 5y ago
There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years (one of which is the subject of this story). Why? Partly because the Supreme Court has been very willing to discover hidden rights within the existing amendments, decreasing the need for states to go through the very arduous process of getting a new amendment over the finish line. That might seem like a fine way to handle things ... if the court is discovering constitutional rights that are in line with your views. But this workaround puts a LOT of power into the hands of the nine justices who control the judicial branch. Amending the constitution was purposefully designed to be harder to do than passing normal legislation, which requires a majority of Congress plus the president's signature. But in many pivotal cases over the past five decades, just five justices decided the outcome.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Discover hidden rights is quite the euphemism for legislating from the bench. But credit is due for the correct answer, which is returning the balance back to the legislative branch.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
    Is the 14th Amendment really written in such a way that you can justify just about anything with it? I swear most SCOTUS landmark cases end up being about the 14th. Especially those considered “legislating from the bench”.
    - tedivm 5y ago
      The 14th amendment is pretty open when it comes to granting freedom and not allowing discrimination. > No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
      - nemo44x 5y ago
        “Equal protection” has been subverted time and time again with the argument that making exceptions for an arbitrary demographic doesn’t take anything away from everyone else. Of course that is blind to the fact just about everything is a finite resource and that special privilege is in fact depriving people of life, liberty, and property.
      - Redoubts 5y ago
        And the weird part is the courts wrote out "shall [not] abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" but then wrote in "[substantive] due process of law" when they realized they stuffed up. But the whole thing should have been scrapped after the civil war anyways. So much of the document, and the drawing up of states themselves, was done to balance slave-power -- something remarkably unimportant after 1865.
    - tcj_phx 5y ago
      > Is the 14th Amendment really written in such a way that you can justify just about anything with it? The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution are known as the Reconstruction amendments. They were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to fix the fundamental problems in the 1792 constitution. Reconstruction Amendments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments The Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10) had been held to only constrain the powers of the federal government. The 11th Amendment had to do with citizens of one state suing another state. The 12th Amendment had to do with the details of electing a president and vice president, and dealt with the problem of the elected president and vice president being opponents of each other (imagine Hillary Clinton being Trump's vice president, and Trump being Biden's vice President). The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. But it wasn't enough to say 'no slavery', as the freed slaves found they were still second-class citizens. The 14th amendment said that citizens of the states are also citizens of the United States, and thereby they have all the rights accorded in the Bill of Rights, and required "equal protection of the laws". Section 1 is the origin of this branch of rights: > Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Institute for Justice has some great podcasts about this period of history: https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/sc/14th-at-150-podcast/ https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/sc/14th-at-150... Ep 1 - Before the Fourteenth: John Rock and the Birth of Birthright Citizenship - https://soundcloud.com/bound-by-oath/before-the-fourteenth https://soundcloud.com/bound-by-oath/before-the-fourteenth My efforts in the federal courts on behalf of my friend wouldn't be possible without the 14th amendment. (Summary: After the state supreme court shot me down, I found an attorney who was oddly familiar with my state court habeas corpus petitions and appeals. I said, "I don't even know that I can petition for habeas corpus on behalf of my friend." The attorney replied, "It's fully within your rights to petition for habeas on behalf of your friend, and the statutes are clear that you can. But you're dealing with a rural judge who will never rule against the community's non-profit mental health service provider." Me: 'Oh.' [I got screwed by the state judiciary.] Then the attorney said he couldn't help me, on account of his having already consulted for the person I was suing.) Federal judges are supposed to be more insulated from local politics because they have lifetime appointments, and are thereby trusted to make politically-inconvenient decisions. In theory. In practice I think they have too much drudgery ("hard menial or dull work.") putting drug mules in federal prison to deal with fundamental mistakes in our treatment of the mentally ill. My district court judge passed the buck up to the court of appeals, who didn't want to deal with me either. I'm going to get a favorable ruling on my current appeal, I hope... [edit: clarity]
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      The bill of rights didn't apply to states until the 14th amendment was passed. Before it only applied to federal laws. So yea, pretty much every bill of rights case is also a 14th amendment case.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    Honestly, the legislative branch can take most of the power anytime it wants. The Supreme Court interprets laws when they are vague, or when they are unconstitutional. It is loathe to consider things unconstitutional when they are plainly constitutional. But the deep division in American politics has resulted in a legislature that is almost incapable of considering major legislation that has lasting impact on Americans, much less passing it. They can certify a stamp or name a post office anytime, but something with as many moving parts as Obamacare was nearly a decade in the making and barely lurched over the finish line as a crude simulacrum of the original plan. There's a reason Congress tends to enjoy a low-teens approval rating on aggregate (all Americans continue to vote the same legislators back into office year after year after year).
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      The congressmen keep getting re-elected because they campaign on high-visibility make work jobs programs. Having separate primary elections does not help things, either.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  The Supreme Court has been making shit up since 1857 at the latest. They are likely to continue to make shit up for several years after the Union dissolves.
  - Aperocky 5y ago
    Similar to how the Roman Senate existed for more than a century after the fall of Rome.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      "...the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
    - hoten 5y ago
      The Roman Senate was more of a social club for at least few hundreds years prior to that. You could argue it hardly existed before the fall, except in name (losing mostly all authority when Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire). It's pretty amusing to imagine a future with a failed-US, and how existing institutions might outlive the country. I wonder if there's been any good books using that idea?
      - jbrot 5y ago
        If you haven't read it yet, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is an excellent novel that explores something along those lines
    - gpm 5y ago
      Eh, the Eastern Roman Senate ceased existing sometime in the 13 or 14th century, while the Eastern Roman Empire lasted up to 1453, so if we take a bit of a more expansive view on what Rome is than "the western half because that's the half closer to western historians" the senate fell first.
  - ByteJockey 5y ago
    1803 at least. They made up their own right to strike down laws (Marbury v. Madison). Admittedly, I'm not sure what a supreme court does if they can't do that, but it's kinda funny that they bootstrapped it themselves.
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  If interpreted strictly, the constitution is really not suitable for operating a modern government (e.g. if you interpret the list of powers given to the federal government narrowly) so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Obviously once they start doing that there's no real way to control what they are able to modify, but the only real way to fix it would be to completely scrap the current constitution and start from scratch (and be much more explicit about everything including rights and constitutional review). However,the constitution is now seen as something like infallible scripture in the US, plus it's impossible to get everyone to agree on anything, so that would be highly unlikely in the near future even though other to countries have been able to do it.
  - ori_b 5y ago
    > so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Or the constitution can be amended.
    - voidfunc 5y ago
      This was Scalia's position basically.. he always held that there is a process for changing the Constitution.
      - eigen 5y ago
        > he always held that there is a process for changing the Constitution. during the time Scalia was on the US Supreme Court (1986-2016), there was 1 amendment to the US constitution (27th) that was took 202 years for approvals. since I don't think he could be considered naive, it is almost certain he was disingenuous.
        jack_h 5y ago
        Why would he 'almost certain[ly]' be disingenuous? He stated in at least one interview that he believed the amendment process was too onerous in its requirements.
    - 5y ago
- stormbrew 5y ago
  > Why? Partly because the Supreme Court has been very willing to discover hidden rights within the existing amendments, decreasing the need for states to go through the very arduous process of getting a new amendment over the finish line. It seems far more likely to me that the arrow of causality goes the other way here, and that the actual difficulty of passing amendments has just gone up in proportion to the number of states admitted and the progressively worsening lack of proportionality of American legislative bodies making them more and more out of tune with what people actually want in their government. Certainly it's not inherently "good" for law to come from the bench in itself, but it seems likely enough that the US would have fallen apart long ago without it happening.
  - sova 5y ago
    Alright, what are the optimal ratios?
    - FactolSarin 5y ago
      The optimal power ratio is one person equals one unit of power. The problem is any change to the Constitution would require 2/3 of the states to agree. Many of those states require supermajorities to pass an amendment. Generally any change that's big enough to go into the Constitution is big enough that a few people will oppose it. A few people is all it takes. We can't even pass an "equal rights for women" amendment now in the year 2021. Hell, we probably couldn't pass the 13th amendment today if it were required.
      - int_19h 5y ago
        You need 2/3 to propose an amendment for ratification via a constitutional convention, but the actual ratification requires 3/4, so it's even harder. It also makes for some weird power dynamics due to extreme imbalance in state sizes. Specifically, we're at the point where the top 1/4 (i.e 12) most populated states together contain 60% of the population, and the remaining 3/4 contain the other 40%. Thus, if small states gang up, they can arbitrarily amend the constitution while representing a minority of the overall population - "tyranny of the minority", if you like. And then consider the fact that it's state legislatures ratifying amendments by a simple majority vote, not residents - which means that, in practice, the 3/4 of the legislatures voting to ratify might actually be representing something like 20% of the population. Then account for gerrymandering etc on state level, and it can be even smaller. FWIW, the Founders themselves were well aware of problems that can stem from an arrangement like that. When Hamilton was explaining why the principles underlying the Articles of Confederation couldn't be sustained long term in Federalist Papers (#22), one of his arguments went thus: "It may be objected to this, that not seven but nine States, or two thirds of the whole number, must consent to the most important resolutions; and it may be thence inferred that nine States would always comprehend a majority of the Union. But this does not obviate the impropriety of an equal vote between States of the most unequal dimensions and populousness; nor is the inference accurate in point of fact; for we can enumerate nine States which contain less than a majority of the people; and it is constitutionally possible that these nine may give the vote." And further noting that even the power to veto can be very detrimental if abused: "To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. Congress, from the nonattendance of a few States, have been frequently in the situation of a Polish diet, where a single VOTE has been sufficient to put a stop to all their movements. A sixtieth part of the Union, which is about the proportion of Delaware and Rhode Island, has several times been able to oppose an entire bar to its operations. This is one of those refinements which, in practice, has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory. The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. And yet, in such a system, it is even happy when such compromises can take place: for upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy." "It is not difficult to discover, that a principle of this kind gives greater scope to foreign corruption, as well as to domestic faction, than that which permits the sense of the majority to decide; though the contrary of this has been presumed. The mistake has proceeded from not attending with due care to the mischiefs that may be occasioned by obstructing the progress of government at certain critical seasons. When the concurrence of a large number is required by the Constitution to the doing of any national act, we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe, because nothing improper will be likely TO BE DONE, but we forget how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods." Reminds you of anything?..
- rcollyer 5y ago
  You're ignoring the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Essentially, the bill of rights was not intended to be exhaustive, nor could it be.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    The problem is more the expansion of the government beyond what the Constitution allows not the expansion of the rights of people.
    - rcollyer 5y ago
      The constitution is remarkably vague about all manner of things. So, the argument that the "expansion of the government beyond what the Constitution allows" is really difficult to support on a textualist basis. What exactly did you have in mind?
      - krrrh 5y ago
        How about the following… > to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes. Being interpreted thusly… > The government argued that if a single exception were made to the Controlled Substances Act, it would become unenforceable in practice. The government also contended that consuming one's locally grown marijuana for medical purposes affects the interstate market of marijuana and the federal government may thus regulate and prohibit such consumption. > That argument stems from the landmark New Deal case Wickard v. Filburn, which held that the government may regulate personal cultivation and consumption of crops because of the aggregate effect of individual consumption on the government's legitimate statutory framework governing the interstate wheat market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
        Aerroon 5y ago
        Wickard v. Filburn is crazy. Filburn grew his own crops on his own land to feed his own animals. The government fined him under interstate commerce laws for growing too much wheat. >The Court decided that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally, is thus interstate, and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
- dundarious 5y ago
  That's how Common Law has always worked, no? Judges make law. I would guess the rate of Amendments is inversely proportional to the stability of the country (static borders, no more domestic wars, increasing body of case law/precedent). Textualists and originalists seem to be Civil Code fans in Common Law clothing.
  - lmm 5y ago
    Judges fill out the details of law that aren't in the statutes, but they're not meant to create substitute statutes from whole cloth.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Sure they are. Michigan still has no murder statute. (There's a penalty statute, but the actual definition is common law).
      - lmm 5y ago
        There is non-statute common law from time immemorial, sure, but later law is supposed to be grounded in the stautes.
- Salgat 5y ago
  This is why the Constitution is called a living document. It's malleable enough in its interpretation to remain relevant even after 2 centuries. Take away that and the constitution would no longer work for our modern society.
- pvg 5y ago
  I don't think this notion is really supported by the historical record. The US supreme court established the principle of judicial review (which is nowhere in the text of the constitution but is the basis for most of what the court does) barely over a decade after the first supreme court was seated. 218 years ago.
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  This is an age old debate between judicial activism and judicial originalism. Most issues seem to stem from interpretation of the text. Activist wing thinks it needs to be interpreted within the current framework of judicial, social and political viewpoints while originalism wants it to be interpreted in the way it was originally written. It's hard to say one way or another. Activits would claim Brown vs Board created the march to racial equality, while originalist would say passing of Civil Rights Law is the appropriate way. It's a debate that is not going away anytime soon.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Even if you're not a judicial activist, originalism for a 250 year old constitution is practically speaking, insane and unrealistic. The industrial revolution hadn't even happened yet! We have no way of knowing what the founders would have thought about modern problems. This is not even considering that a lot of their known ideas were absolutely terrible.
    - wanderingmind 5y ago
      Originalism doesn't mean do not evolve. It means evolution of society must be reflected in law through the laws passed by legislature that is elected by citizenry and not by judges. It is a valid frame of view just like activism.
      - xxpor 5y ago
        That's simply arguing for a civil law system, which makes activism vs originalism almost irrelevant since judge's decisions aren't precedential.
    - jfrunyon 5y ago
      You're right. Relying on it is insane. Which is why it's amendable.
  - tofukid 5y ago
    > originalism wants it to be interpreted in the way it was originally written. Originalists want it to be interpreted in the way it was intended. They go to great lengths to discover the original intent behind the law as it was understood at the time of writing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism I’m honestly amazed that any other position but originalism is considered rationally tenable. Laws are written with an intended meaning and understanding. The idea that the intent and meaning of law should change with time is ridiculous. The law should be changed if people come to find it disagreeable, not reinterpreted. Judicial activists seek to subvert the will of the legislature, and in that way they are criminals.
- cletus 5y ago
  On some level I'm sympathetic to the argument of the textualists (vs the "living document" philosophy. As you say there's a process for amending the Constitution. But there are a number of problems with this idea. The first problem is those who are all about states rights tend to be selective in applying that standard. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that required free states to return slaves to return those slaves to their owners. The Supreme Court ruled (in 1859) that Wisconsin couldn't overrule a Federal court or statute. States rights anyone? Second, if you haven't already look into the Redeemer movement of the post-Civil War era and how the Supreme Court in the name of a literal interpretation of the Constitution [1]. After the Colfax massacre of 77 or so African Americans: > Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The point here isn't that textualism isn't bad per se. The point is that it itself is an interpretation of the Constitution. You also see the effects of this as language itself changes. Two examples spring to mind: 1. The Establishment clause of the First Amendment. "Establishment" here has a very specific historical meaning stemming from the Anglican Church being the established religion of the United Kingdom. "Established" here meant the Church was responsible for what are otherwise actions under civil authority in the United States. Example: registering marriages. In England, you'd have Roman Catholic who would have two ceremonies. One in their own religion and another "official" ceremony in an Anglican Church so the marriage was official. 2. We essentially have a national firearms free-for-all all stemming from a pretty liberal interpretation of a "well-regulated Militia" from the Second Amendment. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption...
  - int_19h 5y ago
    We do not have a "national firearms free-for-all", given that the states still have very extensive powers to regulate them, and many use those powers.
- Maursault 5y ago
  > There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years Did you know the US Constitution and Bill of Rights was massively altered in 2008 without a two-thirds majority of Congress nor any majority of the States legislatures?[1] In fact, this is so, and it was done pretty much by one man ironically abandoning his own career-long ideology of strict constitutional interpretations with an argument entirely based on, figuratively speaking, bullshit. We know what the Founders intended because we have the minutes of the Constitutional Congress in which the Founders debated whether to include a right of self-defense in the 2nd, and this was intentionally left out. "Because most Americans believe something," is not a rational nor strictly legal means of altering the US Constitution, and, in fact, the notion floated then was not true. (Prior to 2008 most Americans did not believe the 2nd included an implicit right of self-defense... only the gunnutters pushed that garbage. Most Americans actually knew the truth, that the 2nd concerns militias.) Regardless of this mistake (or lie), this man somehow single-handedly changed the 2nd from a self-less right to protect one's neighbor from tyranny, to a selfish right to protect your television. This... after the (continuing) suspension of habeas corpus and the 5th earlier in that decade. Changing the Constitution (what's left of it) is easy.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#Second_Amendment_findings_and_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller... [2] I may be cynical, but I'm also pretty angry about it, and it doesn't help that no one seems to care or notice that our beloved Constitution has been screwed with.
  - quantumBerry 5y ago
    >Prior to 2008 most Americans did not believe the 2nd included an implicit right of self-defense Only gun nutters believe in the right to self defense? Who has the right to keep and bear arms? Does the constitution say that the "right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed?" If you bear arms are you no longer entitled to self defense? Do you know who the militia is in the United States? Are you aware every able bodied male citizen between 17 and 45 are considered militia [1]? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
    - Maursault 5y ago
ohazi 5y ago
Catch-22: After he got the amendment ratified, there's a strong argument that the paper probably should have been given a higher grade. But had he been given that higher grade in the first place, he probably wouldn't have gone through the effort to ratify the amendment. You could argue that the paper did deserve the initial C grade, because that's what it took to get him angry enough to go and get the amendment ratified.
- hvdijk 5y ago
  Poor grades are supposed to be for poor work. What you're talking about is intentionally giving good students bad grades for good work just to piss them off, hoping that something good comes out of pissing them off. That's not what grades are for.
  - exhaze 5y ago
    This is literally not at all what happened.
  - newsyyswen 5y ago
    Couldn't you make a case that grades should reflect how people will actually be evaluated in their adult lives? I.e. capriciously, arbitrarily, and often based on a random person's mood at some random time?
    - youeseh 5y ago
      Yeah, no reason to instill a sense of fairness in students, eh? :P
    - vladTheInhaler 5y ago
      I give your argument a B-. Not for any particular reason. I just felt like it. Was that a good use of your time? Many different groups have mutually conflicting expectations about what grades are supposed to be for. But one thing I think students, teachers, and prospective employers would agree on is that they should be rooted in some measure of performance or ability. Otherwise they serve no socially beneficial purpose at all. What is the point in taking a calculus exam if you'll just get 0/100 because the professor doesn't like your handwriting?
victor106 5y ago
> In 1995, he realized Mississippi had never ratified the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. So he pushed that state's Legislature to do it — and it worked. Just think about that for a second: Someone had to push the state legislature to abolish slavery in 1995. Just sickening
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  At least good thing they simply ratified it, instead of putting it to a vote. That could have become embarrassing, as Alabama found: > Back in 2000, Alabama became the last state in the country to overturn its ban on interracial marriage. And despite more than three decades having passed since the Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional (rendering such bans effectively moot), more than 40 percent of Alabamians still voted against overturning it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/alabama-was-a-final-holdout-on-desegregation-and-interracial-marriage-it-could-happen-again-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/al...
- zimbu668 5y ago
  No, they ratified the amendment which had already abolished slavery, a purely symbolic act. The ratification was unanimous so it's not like there was any opposition to it in 1995.
- minikites 5y ago
  Slavery was never really abolished, it's still allowed as punishment for a crime. The bias of police and the criminal justice system against people of certain races takes on a new meaning in this light.
  - pyuser583 5y ago
    No … slavery is/was the reduction of humans to commodities. Even a convicted prisoner can’t be sold. There’s an exception in the 13th for convicts, but the results are very different from chattel slavery.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
mynameishere 5y ago
Hasn't been used much. I was kind-of hoping the truly insane surprise "holiday" "Juneteenth" would get a quick 27th amendment challenge to delay it (as an effective pay raise) to the next hopefully less flamboyantly ridiculous Congress. Of courses it wouldn't matter, as it was nearly unanimous. A tiny, tiny shade of sanity would be nice once in a while, is all.
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
The Constitution of the United States https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...
dcolkitt 5y ago
Wait, what. I’m more shocked at the part at the end about Mississippi not ratifying the abolition of slavery until 2013.
teorema 5y ago
What's really depressing to me is the struggles of the student and lecturer involved, intimated at but never really a focus in their own right: https://www.statesman.com/news/20170314/herman-35-years-later-a-for-austinite-who-got-constitution-amended https://www.statesman.com/news/20170314/herman-35-years-late...

160 points by igonvalue 5y ago

There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years (one of which is the subject of this story). Why? Partly because the Supreme Court has been very willing to discover hidden rights within the existing amendments, decreasing the need for states to go through the very arduous process of getting a new amendment over the finish line. That might seem like a fine way to handle things ... if the court is discovering constitutional rights that are in line with your views. But this workaround puts a LOT of power into the hands of the nine justices who control the judicial branch. Amending the constitution was purposefully designed to be harder to do than passing normal legislation, which requires a majority of Congress plus the president's signature. But in many pivotal cases over the past five decades, just five justices decided the outcome.

dimitrios1 5y ago
Discover hidden rights is quite the euphemism for legislating from the bench. But credit is due for the correct answer, which is returning the balance back to the legislative branch.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
  Is the 14th Amendment really written in such a way that you can justify just about anything with it? I swear most SCOTUS landmark cases end up being about the 14th. Especially those considered “legislating from the bench”.
  - tedivm 5y ago
    The 14th amendment is pretty open when it comes to granting freedom and not allowing discrimination. > No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
    - nemo44x 5y ago
      “Equal protection” has been subverted time and time again with the argument that making exceptions for an arbitrary demographic doesn’t take anything away from everyone else. Of course that is blind to the fact just about everything is a finite resource and that special privilege is in fact depriving people of life, liberty, and property.
    - Redoubts 5y ago
      And the weird part is the courts wrote out "shall [not] abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" but then wrote in "[substantive] due process of law" when they realized they stuffed up. But the whole thing should have been scrapped after the civil war anyways. So much of the document, and the drawing up of states themselves, was done to balance slave-power -- something remarkably unimportant after 1865.
  - tcj_phx 5y ago
    > Is the 14th Amendment really written in such a way that you can justify just about anything with it? The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution are known as the Reconstruction amendments. They were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to fix the fundamental problems in the 1792 constitution. Reconstruction Amendments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments The Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10) had been held to only constrain the powers of the federal government. The 11th Amendment had to do with citizens of one state suing another state. The 12th Amendment had to do with the details of electing a president and vice president, and dealt with the problem of the elected president and vice president being opponents of each other (imagine Hillary Clinton being Trump's vice president, and Trump being Biden's vice President). The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. But it wasn't enough to say 'no slavery', as the freed slaves found they were still second-class citizens. The 14th amendment said that citizens of the states are also citizens of the United States, and thereby they have all the rights accorded in the Bill of Rights, and required "equal protection of the laws". Section 1 is the origin of this branch of rights: > Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. The Institute for Justice has some great podcasts about this period of history: https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/sc/14th-at-150-podcast/ https://ij.org/center-for-judicial-engagement/sc/14th-at-150... Ep 1 - Before the Fourteenth: John Rock and the Birth of Birthright Citizenship - https://soundcloud.com/bound-by-oath/before-the-fourteenth https://soundcloud.com/bound-by-oath/before-the-fourteenth My efforts in the federal courts on behalf of my friend wouldn't be possible without the 14th amendment. (Summary: After the state supreme court shot me down, I found an attorney who was oddly familiar with my state court habeas corpus petitions and appeals. I said, "I don't even know that I can petition for habeas corpus on behalf of my friend." The attorney replied, "It's fully within your rights to petition for habeas on behalf of your friend, and the statutes are clear that you can. But you're dealing with a rural judge who will never rule against the community's non-profit mental health service provider." Me: 'Oh.' [I got screwed by the state judiciary.] Then the attorney said he couldn't help me, on account of his having already consulted for the person I was suing.) Federal judges are supposed to be more insulated from local politics because they have lifetime appointments, and are thereby trusted to make politically-inconvenient decisions. In theory. In practice I think they have too much drudgery ("hard menial or dull work.") putting drug mules in federal prison to deal with fundamental mistakes in our treatment of the mentally ill. My district court judge passed the buck up to the court of appeals, who didn't want to deal with me either. I'm going to get a favorable ruling on my current appeal, I hope... [edit: clarity]
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    The bill of rights didn't apply to states until the 14th amendment was passed. Before it only applied to federal laws. So yea, pretty much every bill of rights case is also a 14th amendment case.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Honestly, the legislative branch can take most of the power anytime it wants. The Supreme Court interprets laws when they are vague, or when they are unconstitutional. It is loathe to consider things unconstitutional when they are plainly constitutional. But the deep division in American politics has resulted in a legislature that is almost incapable of considering major legislation that has lasting impact on Americans, much less passing it. They can certify a stamp or name a post office anytime, but something with as many moving parts as Obamacare was nearly a decade in the making and barely lurched over the finish line as a crude simulacrum of the original plan. There's a reason Congress tends to enjoy a low-teens approval rating on aggregate (all Americans continue to vote the same legislators back into office year after year after year).
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The congressmen keep getting re-elected because they campaign on high-visibility make work jobs programs. Having separate primary elections does not help things, either.
jessaustin 5y ago
The Supreme Court has been making shit up since 1857 at the latest. They are likely to continue to make shit up for several years after the Union dissolves.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  Similar to how the Roman Senate existed for more than a century after the fall of Rome.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    "...the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."
  - hoten 5y ago
    The Roman Senate was more of a social club for at least few hundreds years prior to that. You could argue it hardly existed before the fall, except in name (losing mostly all authority when Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire). It's pretty amusing to imagine a future with a failed-US, and how existing institutions might outlive the country. I wonder if there's been any good books using that idea?
    - jbrot 5y ago
      If you haven't read it yet, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is an excellent novel that explores something along those lines
  - gpm 5y ago
    Eh, the Eastern Roman Senate ceased existing sometime in the 13 or 14th century, while the Eastern Roman Empire lasted up to 1453, so if we take a bit of a more expansive view on what Rome is than "the western half because that's the half closer to western historians" the senate fell first.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  1803 at least. They made up their own right to strike down laws (Marbury v. Madison). Admittedly, I'm not sure what a supreme court does if they can't do that, but it's kinda funny that they bootstrapped it themselves.
resoluteteeth 5y ago
If interpreted strictly, the constitution is really not suitable for operating a modern government (e.g. if you interpret the list of powers given to the federal government narrowly) so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Obviously once they start doing that there's no real way to control what they are able to modify, but the only real way to fix it would be to completely scrap the current constitution and start from scratch (and be much more explicit about everything including rights and constitutional review). However,the constitution is now seen as something like infallible scripture in the US, plus it's impossible to get everyone to agree on anything, so that would be highly unlikely in the near future even though other to countries have been able to do it.
- ori_b 5y ago
  > so the supreme court essentially has no choice but to make stuff up. Or the constitution can be amended.
  - voidfunc 5y ago
    This was Scalia's position basically.. he always held that there is a process for changing the Constitution.
    - eigen 5y ago
      > he always held that there is a process for changing the Constitution. during the time Scalia was on the US Supreme Court (1986-2016), there was 1 amendment to the US constitution (27th) that was took 202 years for approvals. since I don't think he could be considered naive, it is almost certain he was disingenuous.
      - jack_h 5y ago
        Why would he 'almost certain[ly]' be disingenuous? He stated in at least one interview that he believed the amendment process was too onerous in its requirements.
  - 5y ago
stormbrew 5y ago
> Why? Partly because the Supreme Court has been very willing to discover hidden rights within the existing amendments, decreasing the need for states to go through the very arduous process of getting a new amendment over the finish line. It seems far more likely to me that the arrow of causality goes the other way here, and that the actual difficulty of passing amendments has just gone up in proportion to the number of states admitted and the progressively worsening lack of proportionality of American legislative bodies making them more and more out of tune with what people actually want in their government. Certainly it's not inherently "good" for law to come from the bench in itself, but it seems likely enough that the US would have fallen apart long ago without it happening.
- sova 5y ago
  Alright, what are the optimal ratios?
  - FactolSarin 5y ago
    The optimal power ratio is one person equals one unit of power. The problem is any change to the Constitution would require 2/3 of the states to agree. Many of those states require supermajorities to pass an amendment. Generally any change that's big enough to go into the Constitution is big enough that a few people will oppose it. A few people is all it takes. We can't even pass an "equal rights for women" amendment now in the year 2021. Hell, we probably couldn't pass the 13th amendment today if it were required.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      You need 2/3 to propose an amendment for ratification via a constitutional convention, but the actual ratification requires 3/4, so it's even harder. It also makes for some weird power dynamics due to extreme imbalance in state sizes. Specifically, we're at the point where the top 1/4 (i.e 12) most populated states together contain 60% of the population, and the remaining 3/4 contain the other 40%. Thus, if small states gang up, they can arbitrarily amend the constitution while representing a minority of the overall population - "tyranny of the minority", if you like. And then consider the fact that it's state legislatures ratifying amendments by a simple majority vote, not residents - which means that, in practice, the 3/4 of the legislatures voting to ratify might actually be representing something like 20% of the population. Then account for gerrymandering etc on state level, and it can be even smaller. FWIW, the Founders themselves were well aware of problems that can stem from an arrangement like that. When Hamilton was explaining why the principles underlying the Articles of Confederation couldn't be sustained long term in Federalist Papers (#22), one of his arguments went thus: "It may be objected to this, that not seven but nine States, or two thirds of the whole number, must consent to the most important resolutions; and it may be thence inferred that nine States would always comprehend a majority of the Union. But this does not obviate the impropriety of an equal vote between States of the most unequal dimensions and populousness; nor is the inference accurate in point of fact; for we can enumerate nine States which contain less than a majority of the people; and it is constitutionally possible that these nine may give the vote." And further noting that even the power to veto can be very detrimental if abused: "To give a minority a negative upon the majority (which is always the case where more than a majority is requisite to a decision), is, in its tendency, to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser. Congress, from the nonattendance of a few States, have been frequently in the situation of a Polish diet, where a single VOTE has been sufficient to put a stop to all their movements. A sixtieth part of the Union, which is about the proportion of Delaware and Rhode Island, has several times been able to oppose an entire bar to its operations. This is one of those refinements which, in practice, has an effect the reverse of what is expected from it in theory. The necessity of unanimity in public bodies, or of something approaching towards it, has been founded upon a supposition that it would contribute to security. But its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority. In those emergencies of a nation, in which the goodness or badness, the weakness or strength of its government, is of the greatest importance, there is commonly a necessity for action. The public business must, in some way or other, go forward. If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. And yet, in such a system, it is even happy when such compromises can take place: for upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy." "It is not difficult to discover, that a principle of this kind gives greater scope to foreign corruption, as well as to domestic faction, than that which permits the sense of the majority to decide; though the contrary of this has been presumed. The mistake has proceeded from not attending with due care to the mischiefs that may be occasioned by obstructing the progress of government at certain critical seasons. When the concurrence of a large number is required by the Constitution to the doing of any national act, we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe, because nothing improper will be likely TO BE DONE, but we forget how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods." Reminds you of anything?..
rcollyer 5y ago
You're ignoring the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." Essentially, the bill of rights was not intended to be exhaustive, nor could it be.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  The problem is more the expansion of the government beyond what the Constitution allows not the expansion of the rights of people.
  - rcollyer 5y ago
    The constitution is remarkably vague about all manner of things. So, the argument that the "expansion of the government beyond what the Constitution allows" is really difficult to support on a textualist basis. What exactly did you have in mind?
    - krrrh 5y ago
      How about the following… > to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes. Being interpreted thusly… > The government argued that if a single exception were made to the Controlled Substances Act, it would become unenforceable in practice. The government also contended that consuming one's locally grown marijuana for medical purposes affects the interstate market of marijuana and the federal government may thus regulate and prohibit such consumption. > That argument stems from the landmark New Deal case Wickard v. Filburn, which held that the government may regulate personal cultivation and consumption of crops because of the aggregate effect of individual consumption on the government's legitimate statutory framework governing the interstate wheat market. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
      - Aerroon 5y ago
        Wickard v. Filburn is crazy. Filburn grew his own crops on his own land to feed his own animals. The government fined him under interstate commerce laws for growing too much wheat. >The Court decided that Filburn's wheat-growing activities reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, which is traded nationally, is thus interstate, and is therefore within the scope of the Commerce Clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
dundarious 5y ago
That's how Common Law has always worked, no? Judges make law. I would guess the rate of Amendments is inversely proportional to the stability of the country (static borders, no more domestic wars, increasing body of case law/precedent). Textualists and originalists seem to be Civil Code fans in Common Law clothing.
- lmm 5y ago
  Judges fill out the details of law that aren't in the statutes, but they're not meant to create substitute statutes from whole cloth.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Sure they are. Michigan still has no murder statute. (There's a penalty statute, but the actual definition is common law).
    - lmm 5y ago
      There is non-statute common law from time immemorial, sure, but later law is supposed to be grounded in the stautes.
Salgat 5y ago
This is why the Constitution is called a living document. It's malleable enough in its interpretation to remain relevant even after 2 centuries. Take away that and the constitution would no longer work for our modern society.
pvg 5y ago
I don't think this notion is really supported by the historical record. The US supreme court established the principle of judicial review (which is nowhere in the text of the constitution but is the basis for most of what the court does) barely over a decade after the first supreme court was seated. 218 years ago.
thereare5lights 5y ago
For more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
wanderingmind 5y ago
This is an age old debate between judicial activism and judicial originalism. Most issues seem to stem from interpretation of the text. Activist wing thinks it needs to be interpreted within the current framework of judicial, social and political viewpoints while originalism wants it to be interpreted in the way it was originally written. It's hard to say one way or another. Activits would claim Brown vs Board created the march to racial equality, while originalist would say passing of Civil Rights Law is the appropriate way. It's a debate that is not going away anytime soon.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Even if you're not a judicial activist, originalism for a 250 year old constitution is practically speaking, insane and unrealistic. The industrial revolution hadn't even happened yet! We have no way of knowing what the founders would have thought about modern problems. This is not even considering that a lot of their known ideas were absolutely terrible.
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    Originalism doesn't mean do not evolve. It means evolution of society must be reflected in law through the laws passed by legislature that is elected by citizenry and not by judges. It is a valid frame of view just like activism.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      That's simply arguing for a civil law system, which makes activism vs originalism almost irrelevant since judge's decisions aren't precedential.
  - jfrunyon 5y ago
    You're right. Relying on it is insane. Which is why it's amendable.
- tofukid 5y ago
  > originalism wants it to be interpreted in the way it was originally written. Originalists want it to be interpreted in the way it was intended. They go to great lengths to discover the original intent behind the law as it was understood at the time of writing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism I’m honestly amazed that any other position but originalism is considered rationally tenable. Laws are written with an intended meaning and understanding. The idea that the intent and meaning of law should change with time is ridiculous. The law should be changed if people come to find it disagreeable, not reinterpreted. Judicial activists seek to subvert the will of the legislature, and in that way they are criminals.
cletus 5y ago
On some level I'm sympathetic to the argument of the textualists (vs the "living document" philosophy. As you say there's a process for amending the Constitution. But there are a number of problems with this idea. The first problem is those who are all about states rights tend to be selective in applying that standard. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 that required free states to return slaves to return those slaves to their owners. The Supreme Court ruled (in 1859) that Wisconsin couldn't overrule a Federal court or statute. States rights anyone? Second, if you haven't already look into the Redeemer movement of the post-Civil War era and how the Supreme Court in the name of a literal interpretation of the Constitution [1]. After the Colfax massacre of 77 or so African Americans: > Justice Joseph Bradley, a Grant appointee, wrote that the United States had not clearly stated that the accused, in slaughtering more than 100 black men, had “committed the acts complained of with a design to deprive the injured persons of their rights on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The point here isn't that textualism isn't bad per se. The point is that it itself is an interpretation of the Constitution. You also see the effects of this as language itself changes. Two examples spring to mind: 1. The Establishment clause of the First Amendment. "Establishment" here has a very specific historical meaning stemming from the Anglican Church being the established religion of the United Kingdom. "Established" here meant the Church was responsible for what are otherwise actions under civil authority in the United States. Example: registering marriages. In England, you'd have Roman Catholic who would have two ceremonies. One in their own religion and another "official" ceremony in an Anglican Church so the marriage was official. 2. We essentially have a national firearms free-for-all all stemming from a pretty liberal interpretation of a "well-regulated Militia" from the Second Amendment. [1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption-court/566963/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/redemption...
- int_19h 5y ago
  We do not have a "national firearms free-for-all", given that the states still have very extensive powers to regulate them, and many use those powers.
Maursault 5y ago
> There have been only two amendments to the U.S. Constitution over the past 50+ years Did you know the US Constitution and Bill of Rights was massively altered in 2008 without a two-thirds majority of Congress nor any majority of the States legislatures?[1] In fact, this is so, and it was done pretty much by one man ironically abandoning his own career-long ideology of strict constitutional interpretations with an argument entirely based on, figuratively speaking, bullshit. We know what the Founders intended because we have the minutes of the Constitutional Congress in which the Founders debated whether to include a right of self-defense in the 2nd, and this was intentionally left out. "Because most Americans believe something," is not a rational nor strictly legal means of altering the US Constitution, and, in fact, the notion floated then was not true. (Prior to 2008 most Americans did not believe the 2nd included an implicit right of self-defense... only the gunnutters pushed that garbage. Most Americans actually knew the truth, that the 2nd concerns militias.) Regardless of this mistake (or lie), this man somehow single-handedly changed the 2nd from a self-less right to protect one's neighbor from tyranny, to a selfish right to protect your television. This... after the (continuing) suspension of habeas corpus and the 5th earlier in that decade. Changing the Constitution (what's left of it) is easy.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#Second_Amendment_findings_and_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller... [2] I may be cynical, but I'm also pretty angry about it, and it doesn't help that no one seems to care or notice that our beloved Constitution has been screwed with.
- quantumBerry 5y ago
  >Prior to 2008 most Americans did not believe the 2nd included an implicit right of self-defense Only gun nutters believe in the right to self defense? Who has the right to keep and bear arms? Does the constitution say that the "right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed?" If you bear arms are you no longer entitled to self defense? Do you know who the militia is in the United States? Are you aware every able bodied male citizen between 17 and 45 are considered militia [1]? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246
  - Maursault 5y ago

ohazi 5y ago

Catch-22: After he got the amendment ratified, there's a strong argument that the paper probably should have been given a higher grade. But had he been given that higher grade in the first place, he probably wouldn't have gone through the effort to ratify the amendment. You could argue that the paper did deserve the initial C grade, because that's what it took to get him angry enough to go and get the amendment ratified.

hvdijk 5y ago
Poor grades are supposed to be for poor work. What you're talking about is intentionally giving good students bad grades for good work just to piss them off, hoping that something good comes out of pissing them off. That's not what grades are for.
- exhaze 5y ago
  This is literally not at all what happened.
- newsyyswen 5y ago
  Couldn't you make a case that grades should reflect how people will actually be evaluated in their adult lives? I.e. capriciously, arbitrarily, and often based on a random person's mood at some random time?
  - youeseh 5y ago
    Yeah, no reason to instill a sense of fairness in students, eh? :P
  - vladTheInhaler 5y ago
    I give your argument a B-. Not for any particular reason. I just felt like it. Was that a good use of your time? Many different groups have mutually conflicting expectations about what grades are supposed to be for. But one thing I think students, teachers, and prospective employers would agree on is that they should be rooted in some measure of performance or ability. Otherwise they serve no socially beneficial purpose at all. What is the point in taking a calculus exam if you'll just get 0/100 because the professor doesn't like your handwriting?

victor106 5y ago

> In 1995, he realized Mississippi had never ratified the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. So he pushed that state's Legislature to do it — and it worked. Just think about that for a second: Someone had to push the state legislature to abolish slavery in 1995. Just sickening

smnrchrds 5y ago
At least good thing they simply ratified it, instead of putting it to a vote. That could have become embarrassing, as Alabama found: > Back in 2000, Alabama became the last state in the country to overturn its ban on interracial marriage. And despite more than three decades having passed since the Supreme Court ruled such laws unconstitutional (rendering such bans effectively moot), more than 40 percent of Alabamians still voted against overturning it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/alabama-was-a-final-holdout-on-desegregation-and-interracial-marriage-it-could-happen-again-on-gay-marriage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/02/09/al...
zimbu668 5y ago
No, they ratified the amendment which had already abolished slavery, a purely symbolic act. The ratification was unanimous so it's not like there was any opposition to it in 1995.
minikites 5y ago
Slavery was never really abolished, it's still allowed as punishment for a crime. The bias of police and the criminal justice system against people of certain races takes on a new meaning in this light.
- pyuser583 5y ago
  No … slavery is/was the reduction of humans to commodities. Even a convicted prisoner can’t be sold. There’s an exception in the 13th for convicts, but the results are very different from chattel slavery.
- fidesomnes 5y ago

mynameishere 5y ago

Hasn't been used much. I was kind-of hoping the truly insane surprise "holiday" "Juneteenth" would get a quick 27th amendment challenge to delay it (as an effective pay raise) to the next hopefully less flamboyantly ridiculous Congress. Of courses it wouldn't matter, as it was nearly unanimous. A tiny, tiny shade of sanity would be nice once in a while, is all.

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

The Constitution of the United States https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcri...

dcolkitt 5y ago

Wait, what. I’m more shocked at the part at the end about Mississippi not ratifying the abolition of slavery until 2013.

teorema 5y ago

What's really depressing to me is the struggles of the student and lecturer involved, intimated at but never really a focus in their own right: https://www.statesman.com/news/20170314/herman-35-years-later-a-for-austinite-who-got-constitution-amended https://www.statesman.com/news/20170314/herman-35-years-late...