NYT: Let’s Give Up on the Constitution

[Aielyn]

What really gets me is the utter nonsense of the right wing when it comes to things like this.

It was emphasised to me yesterday when I got bored and turned my Australian pay TV system to Fox News (yeah, I know...), and watched a bit of it. The topic of the moment was this New York newspaper that had published an online service where you could find out who in your neighbourhood has registered firearms.

Now, first of all, they were clearly in defense mode (defense of guns, not of the newspaper). But what got me was their attitude towards the law that permitted the newspaper to legally do what it did. The attitude?

"This is a thirty year old law - it was from a time before the internet, before anything like what we have today. It's antiquated, and should be removed."

But if asked why the guns themselves are OK, they'd immediately go "the constitution gives the right to bear arms". Never mind that it's much, much older than 30 years, and was written at a time when "arms" referred to single-shot guns that took about a minute to reload and had a tendency to blow up on the user. It was also a time when there was no such thing as a police force, when there was no technology that provided non-lethal methods of defense, and when they were in the midst of multiple civil wars.

No, in the Right's view, laws that are 30 years old can be antiquated, but if they're 200 years old, they're too important to dare to mess with.

The fact of the matter is that the US constitution is outdated. And despite Kasz's comment about amendments, it really isn't that easy to amend the constitution, which he'll discover if he looks into recent attempts at amending the constitution.

America's system, much like Australia's system, is now under a pressure that it was never under before. Politics used to be all about the back-room deals; now, everything they do is on-camera, or will be leaked. A politician in the past could do their job 90% of the time and play politics for the 10% that they were on-camera. Now, it's at least 90% politics, and less than 10% doing their job (recently, it's gotta be less than 2%). This is true in Australia, too, and Australia's system is more modern (and more successful) than America's is.

The 24 hour news cycle has further corrupted our political systems. They need to be updated, they need to be modernised. And to do that, constitutions will have to be rethought - not just amended, but completely revamped.