The justices actively debated what the historical equivalent of 24/7 digital tracking would look like in 1791. This prompted the famous hypothetical of an officer secretly squeezing into the trunk of a horse-drawn carriage to track someone's movements over several days.
The issue here is that there's no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century. Bug or feature?
> no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century
This reads the same way as people who say things like “we just have to accept that Congress is broken and can’t pass new legislation.” Like hell we do!
Redcoats in your home, comparing notes with all the other redcoats who live in your buddies house and hassle your bartender, watch the comings and goings of everyone else around town, etc, etc.
Of course there is, it is just being done - the constitution is being rewritten out right now by supreme court. All you need is a majority on a 9 person commission.
Given that this isn't an issue in any other modern democracy, I'd say "bug."
https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
To a point. It seems to have ground to a halt.
> The USA has had an uninterrupted system of government since 1789. How many other major countries can say the same?
Quite a few of them can say "we took those good ideas and built on them".
Let's see how those other countries are doing 100 years from now.
The US in 2026 operates fundamentally differently than in 1910, and both are unrecognizable to 1801.
The document was written when there were 13 states, and at best, appetite for a mere handful of others to join. For example, the degree of the weaponization of state-carving in the mid-19th century wasn’t in the cards. A 26 member upper legislature operates substantially different than one comprised of 100 members.
A high majority requirement seems reasonable as you have less and less members. It prevents one person from coming in and convincing two other people to completely change how things operate.
But the optimal majority requirement which balances rigidness and flexibility certainly trends downward as an organization grows. By how much? I'd like to know.
Sort of. We had a civil war. We had a second founding. Then we had violent overthrowing of the reconstruction governments in the south. It has been less than 100 years since the US has provided the franchise to everybody, and even then this is a bit questionable.
Instead of constitutional amendments we get aggressive reinterpretation of the text by politically motivated efforts to change the courts. Despite no change to the constitution itself we've created criminal immunity for presidents and overturned interpretations regarding separation of powers than have been in place for a century.
I think the fix is to require more political parties to be involved, so a 51% majority of a single party can't remove federal laws whenever they have a majority. Then you wouldn't need an amendment to solve controversial problems.