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And now for something completely different.
Ever feel like democracy's got you down? Ever read enough of Plato's Republic (or listened to people who claim they have ready Plato's Republic) to realize that Democracy always leads to a Tyranny? Afraid that you might be in a Tyranny right now?
You may be entitled to... course correcting your constitution via the process the founders prepared for us! Seriously, the US has gone a freakishly long time since our last amendment. It seems like the process is broken somewhere. Maybe a lot of somewhere.
But when many people propose a constitutional amendment they run into the trap of trying to enshrine their political cause of the day into the constitution, which is never going to work. What we need are structural adjustments that do not favor either side but rather incentivize more deliberative, rational, non-polarized decision making. And what better way to do it than updating the Senate!.
The Senate was never meant to be Democratic. It was meant to be the mirror to the House of Lords in it's day, just not hereditary. It was meant to check, correct, and slow down the work of the more populist House. The Senate was meant to be filled with the wisest and best of each State who serve the public interest without being beholden to popular opinion.
Originally each U.S. senator was elected directly by the legislature of their home state. This changed because state elections started to become proxies for Senate elections, so we passed the 17th amendment and now they are elected separately (though with how common it is to vote all of one party on a ballot, the effect of this change is minimal.)
This turned the US Senate from the original deliberative body to a highly polarized mess that is just like the US House but less representative. It solved one problem, but failed us in many ways.
What if we returned to the spirit of the 17th, with some tweaks to prevent the State Senate elections from turning into proxies for the US Senate again?
DeCivitate (who was featured in ACX a while ago) has been proposing some Constitutional Amendments that try to address the more structural issues with the government, without falling into the trap of "What can I enshrine in the Constitution that makes my side win forever?"
For the Senate, he has proposed a few possibilities:
First, no matter what, let's reduce the number of US Senators down to qty 1 per State. 100 is too many to have a close group of people deliberating together.
Second, let's change the way Senators are selected. Let's require that a senator needs to be a member of their State Senate (defined as the least numerous branch of the state legislature thereof, being composed of at least ten members, and whose concurrence is necessary for any act of the state legislature to become law. so no gaming that!)
From there, we have a couple options:
Use a FORTRAN algorithm that determines based on past votes who are the most moderate members of the State Senate and then allows the State Senate to pick from them. Plus: almost impossible to game. Minus: Requires putting a specific computer algorithm into the US Constitution, which might be a plus to some people but might also come with its own vulnerabilities.
Have the Senate vote based on a Condorcet method plus a group veto power to help steer a more normal-looking nomination practice into a moderate candidate.
The articles for each algorithm are worth reading, as each shows a strong consideration for all the nuances for each method and a focus on understanding why we got to this point and avoiding the pitfalls that steered us towards where we are now.
The goal is to have Senators who are serious people who solve problems instead of clapping back on social media. The goal is to have a Senate comprised of people representative of the median of each State, opposed to partisans of the majority party in each state. I think people of both major parties plus people of the minor parties would prefer this to what we have going on now. So... Let's have a Constitutional Convention!
There will not be a Constitutional convention, because the Constitution is dead.
The Constitution relied on common knowledge that obeying procedure was the best way available to generate and wield coherent power.
Manipulating procedural outcomes is, in fact, a superior method of generating and wielding coherent power, and we have created common knowledge that this is the case.
Because the Constitution relied on a form of common knowledge that no longer exists, not only is it dead, but the principles that generated it are dead. It is not just that the Constitution is no longer serving its intended function, but that the very idea that it could potentially serve that function is now understood to be ridiculous.
Or to put it another way, the Constitution required a particular set of beliefs to function. Those beliefs were fundamentally mistaken about core elements of human nature, the fact that they were mistaken has become common knowledge, and so now it is impossible for reasonable people to actually hold them.
I would like freedom of speech. There is no reasonable argument available that freedom of speech is a thing that can happen. The First Amendment has failed to provide meaningful protection for free speech in my lifetime, and the way it has failed to do so demonstrates that rewording the amendment would not help.
I would like my right to keep and bear arms to not be infringed. there is no reasonable argument available that rewording the second amendment would prevent the infringements that have been the norm my entire life.
The power to secure either my right to speech or my right to arms observably does not flow from the Constitution in any way other than the most trivial and incidental. I have watched presidential candidates publicly laugh at the idea that such protections could possibly exist. They were correct to do so, because such protections are a fiction.
You would be better off founding your political reforms off the divine right of kings. It would be a more fruitful soil than this appeal to the divinity of ink and paper.
I do not believe that this is true at all. Those beliefs were not "mistaken about core elements of human nature" so much as John Adams was correct when he observed that Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
I think that's a colorable argument. The reason it is not my argument is that I learned growing up that the Constitution was a set of rules that we all had to follow, and then discovered in adulthood that the Constitution is whatever five justices say it is.
"Unconstitutional" in my childhood meant "a violation of one of the basic rules we and our parents and their parents have all agreed to live by, whose operation be fairly well reasoned out in advance according to basic logic." "Unconstitutional" now very clearly does not mean that any more. I am not deluded enough to think that reading the Constitution and familiarizing myself with the state of current precedent will allow me to predict what will and will not be considered "Constitutional" or "Unconstitutional" ten years from now. On the other hand, if you tell me who is appointed, I think I can predict what is and is not "Constitutional" ten years hence with much better accuracy than blind chance.
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