Senate Unanimously Approves a Bill to Make Juneteenth a Public Holiday

durangodawood said:

that the US Const has never been this perfect document so many idolize.

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No one here has ever claimed it is perfect TTBOMK.

civilwarbuff said:

No one here has ever claimed it is perfect TTBOMK.

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Yeah, that was a bit of hyperbole. Hopefully you can see through it!

durangodawood said:

Yeah, that was a bit of hyperbole. Hopefully you can see through it!

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I can, I just enjoy calling it out......LOL.....

durangodawood said:

Im talking about a day with history that goes right back to celebrations in TX right after emancipation there.


I appreciate the US Constitution a lot, and it was quite a revolutionary document in its day. So I'm not chiding those who generally respect it. I'm more concerned that we've moved toward treating it as divinely revealed text.... a testament of demigods. But obviously it was massively flawed from the get go, and we need to take the notion of amendments seriously as they did in its early days.

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I disagree that it was massively flawed. It was extremely well thought out and fashioned, through compromise, so that every interest group was somewhat, but not entirely, satisfied by the result. I am concerned with the lack of respect for what it is supposed to be, i.e. a rule book for limiting government and a list of individual rights that should never be infringed upon by that government, that the Constitution gets from people that would rather find a political demigod to worship. Putting ever increasing power into the hands of authoritarians doesn't seem to me to be preferable to maintaining the legitimacy of a document that has as its center the limiting and separating of governmental power. The point being to make it so that government officials with authoritarian aspirations would be stymied in their attempts to become rulers rather than public servants. One of the best ideas the writers had was to provide for Amendments. Knowing they were not so omniscient or so wise that they could imagine every possible scenario and its solution, they made it possible to peacefully change the way government functioned by changing the document they worked so hard to put together. They made it somewhat difficult to make changes so that strong momentary public emotion would not override common sense and deliberation. All in all it is a supremely well put together document. The fact that it did not solve every problem , not even every problem of the time, does not mean it is flawed. The Constitution was not written to solve the country's problems but to prevent the government from becoming the country's biggest problem. No one, no philosophy, no ideology and certainly no document is capable of solving every problem society had then , has now, or will invent in the future.