Eturnalshift wrote:
Also, despite the hundreds of amendments that never make it out of congressional committees, there were a few dozen that have. Of those, 27 have been ratified. You don't know if the bill will ever get ratified or not
Counting the bill of rights? lol.
Of the remaining 17, most deal with social issues much larger in scope than this budget crisis.
Don't give me this "I don't know" bs. The world we live in has certain political realities.
This amendment isn't going to happen. There isn't the kind of nationwide super-majority consensus required or even nearly and that's not going to change no matter what because the underlying reasoning, if not fatally flawed, isn't going to ever gather the kind of consensus needed because right or wrong, a lot of people will make the same arguments against it that I listed here.
Seriously, do you really think you can get 75-80% of the US population to agree on anything, let alone this issue? I say 80% because the consensus has to be so strong to convince all legislators, everywhere, to commit to this. There has to be majorities in favor in both GOP and Democrat districts, and given the herd mentality of American politics that means that the party blocs as a whole have to all agree, not just a simple popular majority.
EDIT: Nuts and bolts - 38 state legislatures would have to approve. Now there's no legal compulsion for any state legislature to even CONSIDER the amendment, and a lot of them just won't touch it because it's political dynamite. That ALONE is enough to stop this amendment in its tracks even if there were no other issues and the amendment was totally innocuous and non-controversial.
38 states would mean a broad consensus across pretty much every region of the US, between states that have dramatically different political visions, and also a lot of states that might be inclined to support it on ideological grounds but their legislatures won't support it because they know that it would mean the end of their world when federal revenue stops coming in - states like Alaska or Michigan or Mississippi or Virginia that are heavily reliant on federal spending even though they're traditionally solid GOP/Tea Party supporters.
Conversely, a lot of the states that would have the most to gain from this - strong, net contributor states like California or New York or New England - aren't going to support it because they don't agree in principle.
Now because it requires ratification by both Congress and state legislatures, that means that, like I said, the consensus needs to be very nearly unanimous nationwide and that's not going to happen. My point here is that you're not talking about unanimous consensus at any given level of our political system (e.g., the Iraq War, which was approved by Congress even though the nation as a whole was far less sanguine), you're talking about consensus at EVERY level of the system. 75% of all counties AND all electoral districts AND all whole states is a political impossibility on ANY issue.