Repeal 'em all

The Cranky Conservative ^ | October 4, 2007 | The Cranky Conservative

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

Regular Guy Paul linked to an Ann Coulter column suggesting that if we took the vote away from women, we'd never have another Democratic president.  I'm almost tempted to sidetrack this post because I caught a hilarious comment in the comments section that rebutted the notion that fascism is a leftist ideology - it most definitely is - but that's for another day.

I'm not even interested in Coulter's comments per se, considering they were mostly tongue-in-cheek, but something that Paul said caught my attention.

Generally speaking, I would support repealing all the Constitutional amendments of the 20th century.

So that got me thinking - is there any 20th century constitutional amendment that was either necessary or good?  Let's review.

16th Amendment - Income Tax.  Clearly a bad thing, I think.

17th Amendment - Direct election of Senators.  No amendment did more to distort the original Constitutional design than this monstrosity of the progressive era.  Sure, the MIS-interpretation of the 14th amendment has led to more evil, but the amendment itself wasn't the problem.  The Framers had designed a Constitution that balanced democracy - exemplified by the House - with a tinge of aristocracy, seen in the Senate.  Moreover, the original construction enabled the Senate to more aptly represent state interests.  I could write a paper on why the 17th Amendment is bad, and indeed several scholars have.  Heck some have written entire books on the subject.  Suffice it to say, this was one of our Nation's greatest mistakes.

18th Amendment - Prohibition.  Repealed anyway.

19th Amendment - Female suffrage.  The end result was good.  The only question is whether women would have gotten the vote anyway absent the amendment.  In all liklihood yes, but it would have taken longer for all the states to have granted women the vote.  If we repealed it today, I'm fairly confident that no state would bar women from voting.  That said, we'll leave this one.

20th Amendment: Establishing January 20 as the date of the presidential inauguration, and fixing tterms for Congress, and establishing the line of succession if the President-elect should die.  Eh, more administrative than anything, and the third section is kind of a muddle.

21st Amendment: Repeal of prohibition.  Well, that in and of itself was good.

22nd Amendment: Two-term limit for Presidents.  I know I'll get flak for this, but this was an unnecessary amendment.  This was essentially a Republican knee-jerk reaction to FDR.  I do think that Presidents should step down after two terms, but the codificiation of that in the Constitution was unnecessary.  It's probably made second terms have an even more lame duck feel than they would normally, and it reduces the democratic choice.

23rd Amendment: Granting DC electoral college votes.  Come on, anyone think that was a good idea?

24th Amendment: Banning poll taxes.  Okay, this was probably a good one.

25th Amendment: Line of succession.  It's another administrative one that is mildly helpful.

26th Amendment: Sufrage for 18 year olds.  It's akin to the women's suffrage amendment - repeal of it today would have no effect. 

27th Amendment: Dealing with Congressional pay raises.  Nice idea, but it has no practical teeth.

So, basically, we could probably scap all these amendments and be okay.  Even the voting rights amendments dealing with women's suffrage, poll taxes, and 18-year old voting rights probably would have no ill effect if repealed today, though they were necessary at the time to speed up voting rights.

[gotribe]

20th century seems pretty irrelevant.

[Tears of a Clown]

Not a bad idea at all.

[supercat]

26th Amendment: Sufrage for 18 year olds. It's akin to the women's suffrage amendment - repeal of it today would have no effect.

I think the argument for that one was that it was unfair for people to be drafted and yet not be able to vote. I would think a solution would be to require that military service be a basis for full adulthood for the duration of service, or permanently following a successful term (e.g. if the normal age of adulthood is 21, and someone joins the military at 18 for a two-year term, that person would remain an adult at age 20; if someone joined at 18 and quit at 19, the person would lose adult status).