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Comment by gameman144 | Hacker News Reader

> but the way the system is designed, a small minority can block almost any action.

Again, this is a feature, not a bug. If over three-quarters of states or representatives can agree, then an amendment can get passed. If over a quarter of states or representatives don't want to codify something in the constitution, that is not a small minority.

> How exactly are you interpreting that?

I'm not interpreting that portion at all -- I disagree that the founders were only looking out for their own interests, but that's fine to disagree on that bit. I'm responding specifically to "The Constitution never benefited the country as a whole", which is the demonstrably false bit. Every single person in the US today has the benefit of freedom of speech, for instance (despite the fact that historically this was definitely not the case).

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> If over a quarter of states or representatives don't want to codify something in the constitution, that is not a small minority.

I'd say that 25% of states is a small minority of states, but in any case that's ignoring the population of states, which vary dramatically (California 39M, Wyoming 580K). 25% of the states is not necessarily 25% of the US population; it's possibly much smaller than 25%.

> Every single person in the US today has the benefit of freedom of speech, for instance

Except that our beloved Supreme Court (which has been revealed to be blatantly corrupt) has decided that money is speech, thereby allowing the wealthy to simply purchase our elected representatives.

Just because a state’s population is lower doesn’t mean their needs are less important.

Would you apply a similar standard to the LGBT community? They are approximately 7% of the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...

> Just because a state’s population is lower doesn’t mean their needs are less important.

> Would you apply a similar standard to the LGBT community? They are approximately 7% of the population.

You're mixing up rights and voting. The LGBT community doesn't get to pass or veto any laws.

A person has rights. A state is not a person. Corporations are not people, my friend. I don't believe in the concept of state's rights, so I don't accept the analogy. A state is just an arbitrary set of lines on a map. It doesn't have needs.

In the case of voting, I think the majority should decide rather than the minority, otherwise it's not really democratic. If the 7% LGBT community ruled the country, that would also be a tyranny, not a democracy.

The states over time, have been designed so much that issues cannot get much more than 50% agreement on topics though.

A quarter of states is meaningless when states exist specifically to vote a certain way, rather than to represent groups of people

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