Replies

Seems ok to me as we get the final say so.

You're right...analogies can be changed all night.

It has always given me a twinge of discomfort, however, that a strict majority of people must live with a constitution which they did not create and which they cannot change on their own. Rather, the majority must enlist a portion of the minority to create a super-majority to change the rules devised by long dead people.

In this, I must agree with Thomas Jefferson, who said that constitutions (and laws) should automatically expire, as repeal and expiration are not equivalent:

"Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of nineteen years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. It may be said, that the succeeding generation exercising, in fact, the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to nineteen years only. In the first place, this objection admits the right, in proposing an equivalent. But the power of repeal is not an equivalent. It might be, indeed, if every form of government were so perfectly contrived, that the will of the majority could always be obtained, fairly and without impediment. But this is true of no form. The people cannot assemble themselves; their representation is unequal and vicious. Various checks are opposed to every legislative proposition. Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents; and other impediments arise, so as to prove to every practical man, that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:459, Papers 15:396

Factions get possession of the public councils, bribery corrupts them, personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents;

He just described the state of Congress 180 years after his death. What a visionary.

yikes...thanks...he could be talking about how we are acting today....