The clip entitled, Why is the US Constitution so hard to amend? By Peter Paccone, explains the difficulty of ratifying Constitutional Amendments and how this impacts American Political culture. Paccone starts the video with an introduction of the founders of the constitution and the law they created making it necessary to attain a 2/3rds majority rule and 3/4ths state rule in order to ratify an amendment. He then provides good reasoning for the existence of these obstacles such as: it was put in place because the founders wanted any Constitutional change to be heavily deliberated; because they wanted to prevent laws from being easily undone; and to keep American law somewhat stable.
The biggest takeaway from this video was that American Political Culture revels in its own freedom but also gives itself restrictions from making drastic changes to its original code of ethics. When America’s Constitution was ratified, it created an overarching set of rules that needed to be followed by all states while still allowing these separate states to have some amount of individuality. Even the act of implementing the constitution demonstrates this empowerment of freedom under a common set of checks and balances that is so deeply ingrained in U.S. political culture. One example given by the video was the necessity of the Civil War in ratifying just one amendment to the Constitution, demonstrating that in order to make changes to original U.S. laws, drastic measures must be taken. This concept is also demonstrated as well in American school systems. Teachers have the ability to teach their students virtually any concept they like, as long as it does not fall outside of their school district’s rules. In order to change the rules of the school district, much deliberation involving staff, students, teachers, school board members, and parents must be done.
Questions:
Do the laws of a 2/3rds vote of approval or 3/4ths state majority that are required for amendment ratification stem from American Political Culture in the time of the foundation of the Constitution, or is American Political Culture based on these requirements? A question of what came first.
What Amendment to the Constitution would you propose?
What do you think about the proposed amendment to outlaw burning the American Flag? Why?
Why does Germany and France ratify so many more amendments than the U.S.?
What did Thomas Jefferson mean by “The Earth Belongs to the Living, and Not to the Dead”?
Part d) I really enjoyed asking the discussion questions for this assignment, because it made me think harder about the content of the video.
I thought the video was very interesting and demonstrated aspects of American political culture well! I like the connection of the ratification of the Constitution and how that brought about not only individuality for the states but also granted them freedoms under the law. I never knew that other countries ratify so many more amendments than the United States does. That fact goes to show that the United States undergoes a more extensively deliberative process. The Founders didn’t want just anything to be easily ratified. Overall, the post made me think deeper about how ratification correlates with a large part of American political culture.
This video and blog post is super interesting. I didn’t understand that much about the consititution prior to reading/watching this so thankyou for increasing my knowledge!