People tend to pick a political philosophy that's convenient for what they want. Our constitution makes it very hard to change things at a Federal level. So people who don't want things to change... of course they're going to claim 'originalism'. Nevermind the fact that the writers of the constitution themselves didn't agree on what said document meant in many cases. No principles are involved in this argument except for convenience. That's true of most politics IMO.
Our constitution is just a political tool. To be quoted and wielded like the bible. George W. Bush was right when he said it was just a godddamn piece of paper. But it's a very useful goddamn piece of paper if people believe in it. And what better way to sell your point than to convince every barely-educated American out there that he's a fucking constitutional scholar? The Right has been hammering on that for most of my life- and they've been wildly successful with that tactic.
The Right can only be defeated by a supermajority. Yeah, it's not fair... but it's a fact. A slim majority will *never* be enough, given the structure of our system.
Rural white people like myself have some serious built-in structural advantages in our political system... the most obvious ones being the electoral college and massive overrepresentation in the House and the Senate. Most of that won't change in our lifetimes.
Now, it seems to me that deliberately alienating one of the largest (and THE most structurally advantaged) voting blocks in the U.S. would be a bad idea. For a party that actually wants to win elections and change policy, that is. I'm still not convinced that the Democrats have any real interest in changing much of anything. I think they're basically paid to fail... whether they're aware of that or not.
Our constitution is just a political tool. To be quoted and wielded like the bible. George W. Bush was right when he said it was just a godddamn piece of paper. But it's a very useful goddamn piece of paper if people believe in it. And what better way to sell your point than to convince every barely-educated American out there that he's a fucking constitutional scholar? The Right has been hammering on that for most of my life- and they've been wildly successful with that tactic.
The Right can only be defeated by a supermajority. Yeah, it's not fair... but it's a fact. A slim majority will *never* be enough, given the structure of our system.
Rural white people like myself have some serious built-in structural advantages in our political system... the most obvious ones being the electoral college and massive overrepresentation in the House and the Senate. Most of that won't change in our lifetimes.
Now, it seems to me that deliberately alienating one of the largest (and THE most structurally advantaged) voting blocks in the U.S. would be a bad idea. For a party that actually wants to win elections and change policy, that is. I'm still not convinced that the Democrats have any real interest in changing much of anything. I think they're basically paid to fail... whether they're aware of that or not.
