What is the function of the government?

[skinsfan_1215]

This brings up a point I brought up a little while ago: is it time for the United States to adopt a new constitution?

It would never happen because a huge portion of the populace is insistent that the success of the country has been purely because of our Constitution, rather than in spite of it (as I believe as often been the case of late). But to answer your question, yes, I think it would be beneficial to rethink some of the checks and balances, in some cases strengthen them and in some cases reduce or eliminate where it no longer makes sense.

Step 1- Supreme Court to 15 (or more) justices
Step 2- ??? Let's brainstorm

[deejaydana]

This is an easy one: to get the **** outta the way.

I'm not (entirely) serious here of course. I think a dilemma we're now facing as a country is as we rapidly expand in population there's a strong impulse to provide more government and, perhaps under recent Administrations of both blue and red stripe, to centralize power more to D.C. The irony here is we really should be allowing for more power to be granted to the states as problems need to be solved locally and power ceeded there.

[Yusuf06]

So...is there like a sign up sheet? And please don't tell me it was on some page on my tax return.

I have forwarded your request to the correct department: IknowIwaswrongbuthaveyouseenmywife?@Petraeus.gov

It would never happen because a huge portion of the populace is insistent that the success of the country has been purely because of our Constitution, rather than in spite of it (as I believe as often been the case of late). But to answer your question, yes, I think it would be beneficial to rethink some of the checks and balances, in some cases strengthen them and in some cases reduce or eliminate where it no longer makes sense.

I don't know about the "in spite of it" part but you're probably spot on about people's attitudes about changing the Constitution. I think it was in Jared Diamond's book Collapse that I read that one of the factors that prevented societies on the verge of collapse from making the radical changes necessary was the idea that " 'X' always worked for us before." Therefore, many of the societies he studied doubled down on techniques that were clearly unsustainable or refused to adopt necessary changes in part for the same reason. Add to that the current idea on the right that the Constitution is some sort of divine document written by demigods and recent changes that have increased the influence of money on our politics and the chances are IMHO literally less than zero of another amendment, let alone any kind of radical change.

[Tulane Skins Fan]

#3 was not in the constitution or bill of rights. Our government was never meant to be as big as it is. Government was to be impersonal, not to be involved with the day to day of its citizenry. It protected it's borders, created and enforced laws.. We didn't even have an income tax until 1913(16th Amendment I believe). Up until then the country was run on tariffs. At one point it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. If our government was meant to be big enough to support its (and other country's) citizenry we'd of had to of had an income tax at the very beginning.

Point being, the government was never meant to take financial care of it's citizens

Really... what was the point of the general welfare clause?

[twa]

Really... what was the point of the general welfare clause?

Depends on who you ask

The court in Butler largely went with Hamilton's expansive version...may God help us pay for it

[alexey]

I think we have to keep in mind that the world has changed a great deal over the last 200+ years. In 1776 US had a population of 2.5 million farmers, and this was before industrialization, invention of flight, automobile, railroad, discovery of electricity, germ theory of disease, and a whole bunch of other modern things. Now we have a population of 310 million people and a TON of issues which simply cannot be addressed at a local/state level.

[DogofWar1]

An important thing in the US specifically is that the federal government creates some measure of uniformity between the states for issues where incongruities create problems.

One issue that will very soon become a federal issue, at least in some limited form, is gay marriage. Currently, states are allowed to implement it by themselves, but there are huge problems when couples want to move somewhere. Having some sort of standard across states helps protect people, and also cuts down on paperwork and lawsuits.

It's the same thing that happened on tons of other social issues, like interracial marriage, civil rights, abortion, education, etc. Eventually, the issue moves from being a state issue to a federal one for certain minimum rights purposes.