code monkey wrote:geonuc, yes, the amendment process is not an easy one and I don't think that it should be. however, the founding fathers clearly meant to enable alteration. in other words, they did not consider the constitution to be carved in stone but to be something that could, and should, change with time. (how's that for mind-reading?) consider the conditions of the times, so many of which we find utterly repugnant now. and how would they have thought about the expectation of privacy when speaking on a cell 'phone?
tarragon, i'm afraid that that does not give me a sense of stability. so many of our social norms have changed that this seems to be a mug's game.
To be fair to the Founders, it's a burden they didn't ask for. Some of them anticipated and hoped for changing norms, which is one of the reasons why they kicked the can down the road twenty years by prohibiting any new laws on the issue of slavery. The change in the norm they hoped for may have been public opinion, changing economics, or technological innovation. Unfortunately for the anti-slavery people, technological innovation, in the form of the cotton gin, made slavery worse by reducing the need for slow, skilled slave labor of manual de-seeding and massively increasing the need for unskilled slave labor to feed the hungry, mechanical cotton gins.
Visualizing counter-factuals is always difficult. So, we don't know if things would have been better or worse without what meager stability those rules created. If we hadn't changed the rules, women would still be "represented" in politics by their husbands. One might call that stable, even if one doesn't call it good. But even the Founder's didn't demand that system, they left it up to the states, which have been more eager to change laws to suit the whims of the ruling class (for better or worse).
Edit: Oops! I missed this page and just realized the thread had moved on. Or should I say "pOops!"