A proposed amendment to the United States Constitution:
"Whereas a three-fourths majority of States (Legislatures or Conventions) are required to amend the United States Constitution, and by inference a more than one-fourth minority of States may block such an amendment,
So shall a greater than one-fourth minority of States (Legislatures or Conventions), who support an amendment preventing a change to the United States Constitution, have such an amendment be passed as binding upon the United States Constitution."
Such an amendment, a "one-fourth +1 amendment," will clarify the limits of government power beyond what is set forth in the United States Constitution, and demarcate which "three-fourths amendment" would be required to allow government the use of said powers.
In truth, the Bill of Rights ought to have been of this "one-fourth + 1" nature. That is, it should have only required a slightly greater than one-fourth minority of population to maintain the access to the rights therein. As it is now, when those rights are infringed on, it has now been established that we in fact need a three-fourths majority of the population to defend those infringements.
Addendum:
Another way to word or structure this amendment would be that 1/4th + 1 states could vote to overturn any congressional law as being unconstitutional. This would be a more "re-active" approach, whereas the former would be more "pro-active."
2 comments:
The way the Constitution is written, we shouldn't need amendments to defend those we already have. The Supreme Court is supposed to uphold the laws already in place. Now in practice, sometimes the court has not. While your idea sounds like a solution to that, another side could use it just as well, e.g. and amendment to "defend the establishment clause" whereby, no one can even mention God in any publicly funded setting. This rule would, in effect, make the 1/4 minority another Supreme Court. There's a reason why a Justice is permanent, and not like changeable like a state legislature or convention.
Right, so, the problem as I see it now is that in order to defend those rights, 3/4's of the people are asked to create amendments just to define what the gov't is *not* supposed to do. Really, it should be the other way around. That is, it should only take 1/4 to *prevent* the expansion of gov't.
For the establishment of religion, people should be able to argue that since the Constitution does not establish a religion, and gives no power to Congress to do so, then it should only take 1/4th of the population to prevent the establishment of religion.
However, 1/4th could also create a rule that says gov't is not allowed to prevent personal expression of religion (such as we have in schools now). Instead of taking 3/4's to create some sort of amendment to allow Bibles in school, it would only take 1/4th to say you can't prevent Bibles in school.
Of course, there would be some serious wrangling about conflicting "1/4" amendments, but I'd rather have the Supreme Court be arguing over which of many things the gov't is not allowed to do!
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