LOS ANGELES – President Biden on Saturday night said he expects the winner of this year’s presidential election will likely have the chance to fill two vacancies on the Supreme Court – a decision he warned would be “one of the scariest parts” if his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, is successful in his bid for a second term.
Please give me a hypothetical example of how “the American people” can actually change the fundamental structure of the 3 branches of government. Like seriously, I would love to know how.
Constitutional Convention enacted by State Governors and State Legislatures with the support of the majority of each states population.
Congratulations, the constitution now allows for the execution of gay people.
I’m not sure how people don’t get this. There are already plenty of avenues for the creation of popular change in the current democratic system. The problems we have today largely exist because they are popular.
So if enough people in every state complained about SCOTUS to their state legislature, the state legislature can force the people’s opinion up to the Governors who can do something at the federal level? I guess I’m just not seeing the actual legal mechanism that would be used to force any kind of change.
My understanding is any change to the structure of government at that level requires 2/3rds congressional majority.
And people act like “the people” want this in the first place. Nearly half of “The people” voted for Trump, and probably will again. The US is not united against the fascists. Hell, in this thread itself, you have someone blaming the Dems for not waving a magic wand and somehow assigning 6 more scotus memberswhen we don’t even have a majority in either the house or the senate, and taking such a drastic move with obvious dangers would certainly be objectionable to many.
And how do we think that’d work out?
If we really did get to rip up the Constitution and start over, who do you think would get to write it? You think Bernie Sanders is just going to stroll up with a pen and start setting things straight?
Step 1 would be organizing and unionizing our workplaces (with a focus on strategic industries like food production, railways, construction… the stuff that really makes the gears turn). The next step would be aligning the collective bargaining contracts negotiated by those unions to expire at the same time. Solidarity strikes were made illegal in the US, so unions are only ‘allowed’ to strike against employers who employ their union members. The collective bargaining contract expiration dates would need to be far enough in the future to allow the union to build up a nice little strike fund, enough to pay each member a stipend to survive off of for a month or two. Then the unions and their members need to negotiate with each other and vote to decide on general strike demands to change the current system (my preference would be on revolutionary unionism to end capitalism and put industry in the hands of workers democratically, but you could also do things like change FPTP voting to something else, or really any demand you want to propose that you think could make our country better for us). Then when the contracts expire, the general strike begins. Unions issue their demands on behalf of the workers and the gears turn from there. The only real way to create fundamental change to the system is to use collective organizing and collective action. What I’ve said above is just one way to go about it and I think it’s a pretty democratic way to do it, but there are definitely others (communist vanguard party, democratic socialism via electoral politics, etc.). The UAW is actually advocating for the general strike method and have set a date of May 1st, 2028 (international labor day) for other unions to align their contracts accordingly.