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I do think it is a problem. And while on the face of it it appears to give enough leeway to "do anything," this of course depends on an incredibly powerful and historically regressive Supreme Court, whose old fogies are appointed for life and who can, with the requisite rhetorical gymnastics, overturn what they like. FDR's PWA, NRA and AAA coming first to mind.

Try a bill nationalizing banks or insurance companies and see how far we get with the present constitution, the ruling about AAA running in this sense. Not exactly sure how we can therefore term this document giving "enough leeway to do just about anything..."

And try amending the thing. With 50 states and fractional, regionalized power bases, it's pretty hard to imagine the thing significantly amended. This is of course assuming you can get 2/3 majorities in Congress, itself no small feat.

It's great for property rights. Which is a good thing, assuming you've a fair bit of it.

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant

by redstar on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 09:07:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I don't consider everything FDR did or tried to do as necessarily good, but I'd have to go research more before I could make any decent response on that point.

As far as nationalizing things, I'm not sure it couldn't get very far. States regularly have taken over power utilities for instance with nary a whisper. I.e. I don't think the constitution would outright ban it if there was a good reason to do it.

As for amending being difficult, I consider that a good thing: the crazies who periodically have power (e.g. religious right) can't permanently enshrine horribly bad things in the constitution.

by R343L (reverse qw/ten.cinos@l343r/) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 09:16:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I'd check what they did on AAA for some background. Not a constitutional lawyer, but seems to me what individual states do is covered under state constitutions unless those run counter to the federal one (with the commerce clause being a big deal).

But here, you run into problems of scale (esp. acute in things like the Great Depression). And in any event, if having a third of Americans malnourished, poorly housed and clothed were not such an event as you describe, then I'd argue that there are no such events.

Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant

by redstar on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 09:27:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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