Broken Government

[Belsnickel]

(09-24-2020, 12:39 AM)Dill Wrote: I'd say government is breaking, but not "broken."

Though it may indeed break in November.

But why assume the fault lies in the Constitution, and so could be fixed by re-arranging some points?

I am not an expert on Constitutional history, but I am not convinced that current divisions are a consequence of some failure in current foundations/arrangements of government, though I am not denying that there might be individual laws that contribute to them, create imbalances of power etc. (E.g., FCC or campaign finance regulations.)

Here is why I see amending the constitution or starting over as the way forward. The current division in the country doesn't bother me. People talk about us being more divided than ever, which may or may not be true, but we've always had divisions. There is nothing politically that will fix it. However, the ability for the government to function as it should has become an issue due to this division. One of the largest reasons for this is the discovery of how reliant upon norms our system has been.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, norms are the guardrails of democracy. I forget what democratic theorist that came from at this point, but someone far smarter than me said it. The norms, the unwritten rules of our political system, kept our democracy afloat. As those guardrails have been torn down from repeated ramming by wannabe tyrants over the years, we see the holes in this system. What we need to do is rebuild them and reinforce them with constitutional and/or statutory law. The norms that can so easily be violated with no remorse from those doing it and no repercussions from the voting populace need to become stronger than norms. We need to codify them in ways that can't be so easily ignored and cannot be so easily undone.