Stardate 20030802.1441

(On Screen): I emphatically oppose any attempt to amend the Constitution in order to prevent same-sex marriages.

I happen to support legal marriage for gays, and I actually wrote about that in March of 2001.

But even if I opposed gay marriage, I'd still oppose such an amendment. I feel that the amendment process should not be used in this way, for this kind of issue.

The founders included an amendment process in the Constitution in part because they recognized that circumstances change and there needed to be a means by which the constitutional system could be adjusted. On the other hand, it was clearly recognized that abuse of the amendment process could deeply threaten the system itself. The Constitution was written to grant enough power to the Federal government to permit it to perform the desirable functions of a government, while constraining its powers so as to prevent it from becoming a tyranny. If the amendment process was solely under control of the Federal government, then the government could use the amendment process to eliminate all the limits on Federal power that the Founders had included in the Constitution, and become a tyranny.

So it is the states which control the amendment process. For any amendment to be ratified, the legislatures of three quarters of the states must approve it. Amendments could be proposed to the states by a two-thirds majority of both the US House and the US Senate. The President is not involved in the process, and the Courts cannot rule on the substance of amendments (though they've sometimes been involved in rulings about potential abuses of the amendment process).

If Congress refused to act, then if the states decided they need to, they have the power to call a constitutional convention, which can propose amendments without consent of the Congress. (That's never happened.)

The requirement for three quarters of the state legislatures to approve amendments was deliberately set very high, so that amendments could not be approved unless there was extremely broad consensus that they were needed. And as the number of states in the union has risen, the hurdle has also risen, which is all to the good. As of 1959, 38 of 50 states have to approve amendments for ratification.

But in cases where it's clearly the right thing to do, that can happen very rapidly. The 26th Amendment, giving 18 year olds the right to vote, was proposed to Congress in January of 1971, approved by Congress in March, and was ratified by June. The point of the amendment process is not to be slow, but to be certain.

Amendments to the Constitution fall into two broad categories. Some are technical adjustments, whose purpose is to make alterations in the mechanisms of the Federal government itself:

• The 11th clarifies certain limits on the power of the Federal judiciary relating to the states.
• The 12th related to the Electoral College.
• The 16th legalized income taxes.
• The 17th made it so that US Senators were directly elected.
• The 20th straightened out some issues relating to transition of power after elections. Before the 20th there were small windows in which there actually wasn't a full government in place.
• The 22nd limited the President to two terms.
• The 25th cleaned up the rules about Presidential succession.

These were important but, except for the income tax, aren't generally very controversial. The other broad group of Amendments are far more famous and they primarily relate to social engineering. What most of them do is to make fundamental changes to the social contract.

And with one major exception, all of them expand recognition of the rights of citizens or limit the power of the Federal and State governments.

The question of citizen rights is very fundamental to our system. The basic humanist philosophy which underlay the American system was known as "natural rights", a statement that humans rights are inherent and not granted to them by governments.

In Europe at the time, whatever freedom existed for citizens was granted by benevolent governments, and could be taken away again. Their freedoms were privileges, not what Americans think of as rights. Tyrannical governments constrained the freedom of their citizens, and the Americans had just fought a war in revolt against what they saw as tyrannical rule by the King and government of England.

They felt the need to explicitly delineate certain civil rights in the Constitution and later in many amendments, not because it would grant those rights to people, but because it would prevent the government from infringing rights the people already had inherently. So the 1st Amendment protects free speech and press and the right of assembly, so that citizens could criticize the government and work to change its policies. The 4th through 8th amendments place significant limits on the process of criminal prosecution, which could be (and often had been) abused by governments as a way of eliminating critics.

The Founders were revolutionaries not just militarily against the English Crown, but also philosophically against the existing European consensus on the theory of government. They included their radical concept in the Declaration of Independence:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that the