The Amendment Process radically favors the right

The amendment process in Article V, while a big improvement over Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation, is still absurdly stacked against change and in particular against democratic change.

Tied as it is to the idea of the constitution as a compact among the states, it requires ratification by them two features of which are distinctly anti-majoritarian.

Approval by three fourths of the states is required and two of the tiniest states outvote one of the most populous containing thirty times their number of American citizens.

Approval by two thirds of the members of both houses is required and in the senate the people of the small states are powerful beyond all reason, against those of populous states.

The process gives Yokels, conservatives, the most religiously benighted, farmers, and cows amazingly disproportionate power, enabling them to both frustrate the will of the rest of us but also to force their will upon us.

Think of their most notable gift to America, the Prohibition Era.

Here is more on Article V, the amendment process, and the dominant role of small state conservatism.

Fix the union or get the hell out

Constitutional fundamentalism and constitutional disobedience

Textualism

The Great Compromise: A constitution for minority rule

All of this enormously inflates the power of conservatism in American government and American life.

And it gives them wildly disproportionate power over efforts to change anything in the constitution, including the process of changing the constitution, which itself shockingly favors them.

Hence their endless pious insistence that if you don’t like it you should just try to change it, even going so far as to retail the lie that the Article V process provides unchallengeable democratic control over the thing.

And hence the relatively good conscience with which liberals in black robes just ignore the actual text and make up tales to get the results they want.

Of course, we could always, if we really wanted to, re-write the constitution in a manner that utterly defies its own unacceptable rules for constitutional change, just as the men of Philadelphia defied the rules prescribed in the Articles of Confederation in order to basically get rid of them and move on to something better.

We could convene a constitutional convention whose delegates were chose democratically to represent all Americans equally and states not at all.

We could adopt a method of ratification that put the matter before the people, all to have an equal say, and not at all before the states.

Isn't that what we did for Iraq? Or was it Afghanistan?

Isn't that what is nowadays always done when a nation chooses a constitution?

Just a thought.

And make damn sure the new constitution includes simple provisions for democratic change.