2y ago

I never understood why Americans treat their Constitution like some holy book

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Other than that pesky wording on the 2nd amendment, the US Constitution is pretty good.
- It includes the electoral college though, which treat's peoples votes differently based on where they live, which is undemocratic.
  
  Okay fair enough. Disproportionate representation is stupid. Any other egregious amendments? I'm not American and I welcome the education.
  
  As far as amendments go, the most egregious that comes to my mind is the 13th:
  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
  Slavery is still legal within the united states, but only in the case of prisoners. Slavery should be illegal in all forms no matter what, but we're still stuck in the 1800s. People commonly think the U.S. ended slavery after the civil war, but instead we just turned to neo-slavery, with a million Jim Crow laws on the books to put black people right back out in the fields.
  Nowadays instead of Jim Crow, we have the war on drugs which largely does the same thing. The U.S. has the largest per capita prison rate out there for a reason.
  
  The Senate itself was specifically designed to degrade the democratic power of more populous states.
  
  That was the intention of the house, not the senate. But regardless, the design of congress isn't too great either. The power of a person's vote on the legislature should be as close to equal as is possible with everyone else's. No vote should have more weight/power.
  
  Can you expand on that? I was referring to the distribution of senators because it gives small states the same number of votes as large states. That means that each individual voter in larger states has proportionately less representation.
  
  Yeah, I think that is wrong, as it gives people an unequal voice over legislature. Ideally the entirety of congress would looks something far closer to the house of representatives, with each representative being representative of the population.

245 comments