Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Constitutional weakness

We're supposed to view the U.S. constitution as a sacred object, but there are a lot of big problems with it, not the least of which is the Senate, which gives a Wyoming voter 70 times the representation it gives a California voter. It also gives a somewhat lesser advantage to small, rural states in the electoral college, which has resulted in the previous two Republican presidents being elected with a minority of the popular vote. 


So yeah, we really ought to change that. But there's actually something I worry about more. When the drafters of the constitution made the president commander in chief of the armed forces, there weren't any nuclear weapons. But right now, the constitution makes it possible for a single individual, possibly insane, to order the immediate death of hundreds of millions of people, and there is no legal recourse. Our only hope in that case is literally mutiny.

2 comments:

Don Quixote said...

Synchronicity! This is such an important point. I was just thinking about it today. We’ve been worried for so long about terrorists, except now the terrorists are domestic. Shitler, for example, is the kind of person who might be willing to destroy everything if he can’t have his way. There are whole jetliners that have gone down because one guy decided to commit suicide by taking everybody with him. This is really something we need to address before it happens, and it’s not as difficult as constructing a laser to take down a comet or asteroid headed toward earth. I would say one nanogram of prevention is worth 100,000 tons of cure — and that there won’t be any cure if that shit goes down.

mojrim said...

Thing is, the connie vests congress with the power to declare war, not the president. The only reason the president can do insane, unilateral shit is that congress has quit its post. Question any senator's aide and what you will find is that they find foreign policy (which is, today, mostly war) electorally dangerous. We have "accidentally" recreated the crown-parliment system of the 18th/19th centuries.