• Buffalox@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    True, I have not heard of other countries that do what USA is doing with the shutdown.
    Americans are such a bunch of amateurs on democracy, despite they were among the first to use it!
    Or maybe because of it? They sorely need a major reform of their democracy. But it looks like it will probably be the wrong way to an even more authoritarian system.

    • ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net
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      10 hours ago

      The problem is that they were “early adopters” and created a system impossible to reform. Civil war was the perfect moment to do a major rewrite of the system. They had a human rights issue and their system proved completely unable to resolve it. Unfortunately instead of realizing it’s broken and fixing it they did some minor changes and moved on. Now they have a constitution that is more of a holy book than legal document. No one understands it, the laws don’t mean anything but it’s sacred so it’s impossible to even talk about changing it.

    • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      I think they can’t because their constitution is a holy text from the heavens and therefore cannot be trashed (or archived) and rewritten from scratch.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        It literally has amendments. The latest one was ratified in 1992. The founding fathers considered the constitution to be a living document, hence why there is an amendment process.

        Ironically, the people treating the constitution like gospel are the same people that keep ignoring it.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          5 hours ago

          It’s the thing conservatives do. They just say stuff for effect and don’t care about truth or consistency.

          The Constitution is a perfect document that must be upheld when it suits their goals, and a living document that must be updated when that suits their goals instead. They are liars. They should not be accepted in polite society.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          The same founding fathers that apparently thought it was a document that would probably be replaced after a few decades? (Or is this something everyone says that has no basis in reality? )

          • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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            40 minutes ago

            Maybe? I don’t recall them suggesting that it should be replaced every few decades.

            Worth pointing out that there is a process in the constitution for changing the constitution, but there is no process for replacing the entire document. So I’d say there is pretty obvious intent for the document to change/evolve over time.

            Hypothetically, we could amend the constitution to have a process for replacing the whole document though.