Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

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Good god you don't rewrite the constitution. What are you talking about. It was designed as a living document for a reason. Not one thing has been brought up that can't be fix (if indeed it is broken) by ratifying the currant document. That's how it works. You know that whole thing about blacks not being enslaved, or the part about the voting age being 18, or the thing about legal representation being provided to everybody, etc... None of that was in the original. And the part about prohibition was added later too and then... get this... REMOVED. Why give government the chance to realy fuck shit up by leting people who have no idea what it's like to live in aunder an oppressive rule with no representation or say in how you are governed make a whole new law of the land. We stick with our perfectly good constitution and add or subtract as needed.

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The current constitution works fine but needs to remove the ambiguity of certain amendments and make it clear cut, using modern language that everybody can understand.

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Everybody doesn't need to understand it. It's a legal document, it has to make sense from a legal stand point. it doesn't mater if the average every day joe understands it because the average every day joe has nothing to do with it. The laguage it use is not ambiguous, you just aren't a lawyer so you don't speak in those terms. The legal phrases make perfect sense to those who need to read it and make ammendments to it.

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At 12/13/08 02:01 PM, gumOnShoe wrote:

At 12/13/08 01:51 PM, aninjaman wrote: What excatly is wrong with our current constitution.

It isn't entirely seperated from church & equal writes aren't guaranteed to everyone (ie homosexuals).

The constitution specifies that Homosexuals are denied legal rights? or is it that it hasn't aptly taken to the task of protecting them specifically...?

Also, its very unclear as to what our responsibilities are towards enemy combatants, if there are any and there's been too much lee-way for the exectutive branch of late.

That i can agree with, of course this goes against the common liberal mantra that the constitution is a flexible document that can be interpreted any which way.

If it's your [you in not in the personal sense] intention to make treatment of prisoners in style X the norm according to the constitution, you may find yourself baffled that say 50 years later people are pointing at you and calling you a prisoner abuser, and that your laws on dealing with enemy combatants are too conservative, it might be more effective to just keep electing a certain stock politicians so that the 'moral' way of dealing with prisoners is taken to.

not that the current system is acceptable.

Finally, it completely ignores technology because we didn't have it at the time and there's probably some constitutional writes or laws that we could put in there as well (especially since arms are a guaranteed right).

do you want the constitution to acknowledge the existence of technology? who can use what technology? this is very vague...

:When it can be argued that porn and junk mail can be considered "Freedom of Speech", there's an issue there. And how the electric chair didn't constitute as "Cruel and Unusual Punishment" baffles me.

i think when the term cruel and unusual punishment was used by the founders, it meant punishment that wasn't used with the intention of humiliating the convict with intentional additional punishment prior to death... such as Tarring and feathering, dragging and quartering, whipping, burning, etc. The gallows and the guillotine were the two most effective means they had at the time to kill someone as quickly and painlessly as possible, the only reason we regard them as cruel and unusual today is because while they were often quick and painless they still caused SOME pain, and modern methods of execution are even less painful.

I'm not entirely sure whether the electric chair was as painless as the guillotine, i would think the electric chair would have been more painfull...

Sending someone porn and junk mail against their will, i would regard as an invasion of personal privacy in the sense that people are flooding your personal computer with items that you don't want, it's metaphorically no different than if someone was flooding your house with them.

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Sure, the document is outdated and can't deal with a lot of issues specifically because those issues did not exist at the time it was written.

However, getting all the states to agree on those issues like abortion, same sex marriage, stem cell research, etc. would make it impossible and quite foolhardy to try to rewrite the document.

Amendments, maybe, but it'll still be very difficult.

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Dam, listen if the constitution does not deal with a specific thing, you ammend it to deal with it. That's the idea behind a living document. It changes and adapts to new things. rewriting it would mean that it is a document that can be removed which means that the laws in are meaningless, we can just rewrite it later. Oh we, the government, think that the people have too much strength. How do we fix that? Lets rewrite the constitution again to take that stuff away.