No, the Senate needs to go back to representing (and being appointed by) the state governments, not being voted on.rode_kater wrote: ↑Mon Nov 30, 2020 3:01 pmI believe the US constitution suffers badly from "first-mover disadvantage". For its time it was very innovative, though not without its flaws. Countries that later adopted constitutions copied the good bits and changed the bad bits. To actually update the US constitution with all the subsequent innovations is basically undoable.Pdxfashionpioneer wrote: ↑Sun Nov 29, 2020 10:13 pm The Preamble of the US Constitution does NOT say the following is the blueprint of "a perfect" anything; it says they were trying to establish "a more perfect union" through the following document. They doubled down on that recognition of their limitations by including two distinct mechanisms for amending their creation; the process that's become the standard mechanism and by a Constitutional Convention called by the states. Considering how well our Constitution has served us and for how long, I still say the original Constitutional Convention did a darned good job.
Examples of nice improvements (coincidently from the countries I'm most familiar with):
- Territories get representation in the Senate, as well as states (Australia)
- Bills regarding appropriations/taxes/duties may only be about that and not anything else (to avoid tacking unrelated crap onto budget bills). (Australia)
- No electoral college (basically everywhere)
- Protecting freedom of expression (thus also clothing) in addition to freedom of speech (ECHR, NL)
- Explicitly protecting privacy (NL)
I used to see people proclaiming that the US had the best constitution ever and everything else was just a weak copy. I don't hear that so much these days any more.
- Some form of PR and abolishing the district system (NL)
Bills do need to stop getting filled with unrelated crap. Not sure how to fix that, but it's a real problem.
The Electoral College needs to stay. It is the only thing keeping a tyranny of the majority at bay. Without it, the nation as we know it would collapse.
The US actually, in some ways, has more privacy protections than most countries. Health information here is more protected than anywhere else that I'm aware of, thanks to HIPA.
I'm assuming by PR you are referring to some sort of parlimentary representation. That's an idea that has some merit, gets third parties involved and such. But it also leads to an instability and chaos that I'm not sure we want. Plus, with as large a country as the US is, having representation of your locality is a good thing.