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Can you imagine a US Constitutional amendment that, if proposed, would actually get passed these days?
The relevant part of the US Constitution is:
So, either 2/3 of both the House and the Senate, or 2/3 of the states must propose it, and then 3/4 of the state legislatures or conventions in those states must support it, for it to become part of the Constitution... as I understand it at least.
What sort of possible amendments could you imagine would actually pass and become part of the US Constitution in today's political climate, if they were proposed?
I find this to be an interesting question because it is a barometer of what the various factions of US politics actually agree on, despite their various differences, and also a barometer of how much polarization there is in today's US political situation.
Line item veto.
It was briefly introduced in the 90s, but ultimately declared unconstitutional. It would be a method of breaking the "giant omnibus bill" system of government, by allowing the president to remove pork-belly spending at will. ((One proposal I've seen would restrict the veto to bills passed by a simple majority, bills passed by a two-thirds majority that would allow congress to overturn a veto would be immune from a line item veto, so if we really put together a compromise bill that has near unanimous congressional support it would be immune))
Then you get stuff like this where the executive completely reverses the meaning of the legislation.
Education is like a religion for Democrats sometimes. Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
Probably the biggest actual effect that public education has on society these days is not that it educates. It is that it emancipates the work force from child raising, keeps kids off the street when they are at a rambunctious age, and teaches kids how to sit still and take orders from boring authority figures. It also occasionally helps some kids to escape abusive relatives. Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.
However, I think that for the most part Democrats' attitude to education does not primarily have to do with any of these factors. They seem to, for the most part, actually believe in the rosy views of public education and its didactic benefits that they espouse.
I don’t think this is the main benefit to democrats from the public school system. Notably democrats don’t seem to think they’re very good at indoctrinating the youths through it even if they were trying.
Instead I think it’s that it’s a form of employment- and typically one of the bigger employers in any given area- which influences its employees to vote democrat. The other option for most teachers is probably ‘be a housewife’ after all, and housewives vote pretty Republican. Likewise I have a hard time believing that school janitors, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, etc don’t vote much more democrat than their private sector counterparts. I think it also goes beyond just voting; teachers unions and small dollar campaign contributions from teachers are key sources of contributions for democrats.
There's another form of employment that has basically no accountability for results. It's called "welfare".
People on welfare tend to vote for parties that promise more welfare (expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies being the two most common ways), and their interests follow naturally downstream from there (even though a good chunk of people- welfare recipients or not- don't realize that).
I don't think there's anything more complex than that going on, but it's also why you can't meaningfully reform these systems- if you went back to 1950s standards in these areas, you'd both cut welfare benefits off from a massive number of women and incinerate the 4-8 years of their lives they spent getting
a useless degreecertified to receive that welfare. The sociopolitical ramifications of this would be interesting, to say the least; the last time the economy contracted that hard it forced the New Deal.D+30 for young women, and an even split for young men? It's only the men the teachers need to worry about indoctrinating into the "you're trash and deserve this" philosophy (and they're clearly doing that quite well, aided by parents who grew up in a milieu of "the sexes are co-operating" and try to enforce it blindly)- for the women, cashing the checks is good enough.
What are you on about?
If you’re determined to be a cynic, welfare is the bread and circuses required to stave off revolt. How does that describe education?
A more sympathetic description might be that welfare adds slack to the economy, allowing employees to take more risks without getting relegated to the debtors’ gaol (or revolting). It’s a hedge. This is also not a good description of public education.
Are you trying to argue that welfare recipients are drawing money from “ expanding the education system and increasing administrative burden on companies”? What does that mean?
My assertion is that "bread and circuses" comes in the form of government creating [the need for] bullshit jobs for people who won't tolerate not having a job. We could make education vastly more efficient, and we could take away the degree pipeline for people whose jobs won't require them, and we could demolish most of the regulations that mean companies have to retain certain kinds of employees, and we could dismantle a good chunk of the administrative state.
But we won't do that. And the reason we won't do that is because the people in these positions are a significant (and politically powerful) fraction of the population who won't accept having "no place" in the economy, and they won't accept being consigned to a basic income that pays the underclass the same as them (or dependent on homemaking for an [indirect] income)- they're capable of doing more damage in a revolt, so governments obviously have to pay them more to make them not do that (which, come to think of it, is a major problem with UBI that I've never heard anyone discuss before).
I'm arguing that the people who work in those fields are, to a significant degree, themselves welfare recipients, and thus "the people who work in the education-managerial complex and support increasing the size of the education system and mandating companies increase the number of management jobs" is equivalent to "welfare recipient voting for more welfare", even though said welfare recipient might not fully recognize it as such (because the system is laundered through the guise of employment).
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