• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Loosen up

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on an amendment to the Constitution he would approve of, and this might surprise a few people:

I am sometimes asked if I would amend any provision of the Constitution, and actually the one provision I would amend is the amendment provision. It is very, very difficult to amend it, infinitely more difficult than it was when that provision was written. It takes a two-thirds vote of each House to propose the amendment and then it has to be approved by three-quarters of the states. I figured it out once, if you took a bare majority in the smallest states by population, something less than 2 percent of the population could prevent a constitutional amendment. That is probably too severe and certainly much worse than it was. The disparity in population between California and Rhode Island is so much greater than what existed at thte framing. I would amend that.”

When you think about, his position is a very rational one. The Constitution means what it says it means and must not be treated as a "living document" subject to the whims of the moment, but that doesn't mean we have to have rules set in stone for all of time. Make amendments less difficult to achieve, so that when a better idea comes along we can do something about it.

At the link is a video with Scalia talking about "13 falsities often employed in interpreting the Constitution." Interesting stuff, whether you agree with him or not.

Quantcast