Constitutional Amendment

This one has been making it's way around the liberal blogosphere. I think a lot of people would be appalled to hear that Huckabee is proposing amending the Constitution so that it reflects God's word, or whatever it is he is planning exactly. Personally, I think we should see more of this kind of talk. Not amending the Constitution so that it reflects the bible, but talk about Constitutional amendment generally. Constitutions are made to be amended. They have amending formulas built into them. The proper structure of Constitutional government is to have courts interpret the Constitution, and legislatures respond to judicial interpretations, if so desired. Constitutional amendments usually require something like a super-majority vote of a legislature (67%), and/or ratification by a certain number of states/provinces/etc that make up the federation. Since changing the Constitution is a change in the fundamental legal structure of the country, it should require such an onerous level of political support to achieve.

Constitutional amendment is, in my opinion, a far more appropriate mechanism for responding to Constitutional interpretation by the judiciary than the method recently used by American conservatives: which is trying to overturn undesirable outcomes by changing the composition of the Supreme Court. And changing the composition to include judges who simply don't believe in stare decisis.

So campaigning for a Constitutional amendment to ban, say, abortion and gay marriage is a far more open, transparent, democratic and Constitutional method of achieving those aims than having to use code words like "strict constructionist" judges to signal one's attempt to achieve those same aims by other means.

But Mike D loves code words, so maybe he disagrees.