I'm British, so please tolerate my ignorance for a moment.
If I understand US law correctly, the constitution can be amended at will, through a process not exceptionally arduous - certainly more difficult than passing ordinary legislation, but not exceptionally so. Many other federal states have similarly strict requirements when passing federal legislation, but have gone as far as to rewrite their constitutions from scratch.
If my understanding is correct, then what explains the US Constitution's position in political culture and discourse? I have been given the strong impression that the Constitution is regarded in many quarters as an immutable guarantee of basic freedoms or a fixed check on the powers of the state, but on a practical level it seems to be no such thing. There is a strong rhetoric in many quarters that if something is allowed or prohibited by the constitution then it is irrevocably and permanently allowed or prohibited, but the history of the document seems to contradict that.
The eighteenth amendment was repealed, why not the tenth? If the sixteenth amendment empowered the federal government to collect taxes directly, what would preclude a twenty-eighth amendment from allowing it to impose basic rights for employees?
It is my understanding that there is a federal minimum wage. Is this unconstitutional? If so, what real political significance does the constitution hold if it is so freely disregarded?
Apologies to all for the barrage of questions, but I have done a reasonable amount of reading on the subject and am genuinely baffled by the almost mythical nature of the US constitution and the apparent gulf between perception and reality.
The constitutionality of a Federal minimum wage is questionable. It was ruled unconstitutional in the 1930s along with a number of other expansions of Federal authority, however, the president and congress threatened to increase the size of the supreme court and add enough sympathetic justices to allow the replacement legislation to stand.
Changing the Constitution is intended to be hard. I want my elected representatives to be much more reluctant to change what the government is allowed to do than to change how it does the things it's already allowed to do. I especially want a list of things the government is not allowed to do to me, and I want it to be extraordinarily difficult to remove items from that list.
Note that almost all of the amendments either entrench fundamental rights - placing certain areas of federal policy-making out of bounds - or tweak the structure of the federal government's institutions. In other words, the amendments are (usually) aligned with the intention of the constitution itself, that is, to define the structure and powers of government.
Attempts to entrench particular social policies as constitutional amendments create an enormous amount of contention, are often considered an abuse of the amendment process, and usually fail, as the case of the 18th amendment demonstrates.
The amendment process is by design complex and time-consuming; the constitution has only been amended 28 times in 222 years, and the first ten were immediately upon its adoption. The most recent amendment - the 27th - was ratified in 1992; it was originally proposed as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791, and took almost 202 years to make it into the constitution.
The reality of is the constitution is surrounded by a well-developed body of law which is applied vigorously by the courts, who routinely strike down legislation determined to be unconstitutional; the rare attempts to use the amendment process to circumvent judicial review almost always fail.
In fact, apart from the 18th amendment, I can't think of a single instance in which a constitutional amendment was successfully enacted in order to create social policy that would otherwise be ruled unconstitutional by the courts - even FDR couldn't manage it.
If I understand US law correctly, the constitution can be amended at will, through a process not exceptionally arduous - certainly more difficult than passing ordinary legislation, but not exceptionally so.
It's orders of magnitude higher in difficulty. We've only amended our Constitution 27 times since 1788, and the first ten were all at once towards the beginning. We've probably passed at least tens of thousands of federal statutes in that time period.
Many other federal states have similarly strict requirements when passing federal legislation, but have gone as far as to rewrite their constitutions from scratch.
The Constitution defines and protects many of our essential civil rights and liberties. Many Americans are loath to allow the current political system to redefine those. Seeing the kind of hash "many other federal states" have made out of simple concepts like freedom of political expression, I'm inclined to think we made a better decision than they did.
I'm American, so please tolerate my spelling of "gray". And my irritation at my own country's weirdness. And my skepticism.
I'm at least as in-the-dark about this as you, though I highly suspect it's merely because people want it to be an immutable guarantee of basic freedoms, so they can point to it and say, "See? I'm right by this always-correct document". Every governing body wants something all-important they can point to, forever, to tell them what to do, and to blame if they later decide it's wrong.
Until they don't want it to be. Then it's full of / seriously lacking some socio-political fad.
Few attempting to change it progress past that stage, granted, and occasionally they are right in both uses, but it's far more often a legal weapon than it is a usable document.
Amending the US constitution is substantially harder than in most countries: any given amendment must be approved by a 2/3rds supermajority in both houses of Congress, and then must be ratified by 3/4ths of the State legislatures to take effect. The States themselves define requirements for their own "ratification", so they may also impose supermajority requirements (though IIRC none currently do).
Compare this with France, as an example, where constitutional amendment requires either a referendum, or approval both by each house of Parliament separately and then together. Not easy, but you don't need to get the buy in of all the regional governments to get it done. There actually have been amendments in the US which have been stopped by insufficient State buy-in: see the 27th amendment, which was submitted to Congress in 1789 and finally came into effect in 1992 when Alabama ratified it! (Note that most proposed amendments now have ratification-expiration clauses for this reason.)
Amending the US Constitution is obviously possible, because many amendments exist; but the strong cultural significance of the Constitution actually makes it much more difficult to amend. The Constitution is seen as a guarantee of rights and freedoms, and a codification of our "perfect" governmental system. Changing it at all is seen as a strategy of last resort; changing it in any way which is viewed as restricting freedoms, or as trivial, is generally shouted down by members of all sides. The fact that it's a Big Deal makes it harder than the procedure alone.
To balance this, though, there's the fact that it's a lot easier to sideline the Constitution than many like to believe. The only governmental branch with the power to strike down an unconstitutional law is the Court, which cannot strike it down unless someone actually brings a case challenging the law. So an unconstitutional law which is never applied, or which no one hates enough to bring a court case, is likely to stand. And in the US, one must have "standing" with the courts to bring a case--that is, you must have actually been harmed by someone under this law. You can't bring a case if you just disagree on general principles. This makes the process of removing bad laws very slow.
The wording of the Constitution is also fairly vague by intention, and clauses which are interpreted in one way by the courts now may be interpreted differently a century forward or backward in time. This allows a "soft" evolution of its content, and is the basis of much change over the life of the country. Note that a constitutional amendment was once considered necessary to ban alcohol, but that now bans on other substances in legislation are upheld by the courts.
The other side of this, though, is that if a Constitutional decision is made by the Courts, it's seen as pretty much decided by much of the country (though less so recently). Much social change in civil rights, reproductive rights, etc has been accomplished through court challenges.
I don't know how well-decided the constitutionality of the minimum wage is, but it seems unlikely to garner many serious challenges. Note also that the US Constitution includes a clause giving the federal government the power to "regulate Inter-State commerce", which has been used to justify all manner of things.
So to sum up: the US Constitution has a semi-sacred status as the document which enumerates and protects the rights of US citizens. It's pretty damn hard to amend, and this mythic status makes that even harder socially and politically. Enforcement is slow, tricky, and requires court action, but has real results. It's an odd system, I'll admit, and I wonder how well it works sometimes. But I personally like the idea that certain things should be really hard to change, and that those things should include our civil rights.
If I understand US law correctly, the constitution can be amended at will, through a process not exceptionally arduous - certainly more difficult than passing ordinary legislation, but not exceptionally so. Many other federal states have similarly strict requirements when passing federal legislation, but have gone as far as to rewrite their constitutions from scratch.
If my understanding is correct, then what explains the US Constitution's position in political culture and discourse? I have been given the strong impression that the Constitution is regarded in many quarters as an immutable guarantee of basic freedoms or a fixed check on the powers of the state, but on a practical level it seems to be no such thing. There is a strong rhetoric in many quarters that if something is allowed or prohibited by the constitution then it is irrevocably and permanently allowed or prohibited, but the history of the document seems to contradict that.
The eighteenth amendment was repealed, why not the tenth? If the sixteenth amendment empowered the federal government to collect taxes directly, what would preclude a twenty-eighth amendment from allowing it to impose basic rights for employees?
It is my understanding that there is a federal minimum wage. Is this unconstitutional? If so, what real political significance does the constitution hold if it is so freely disregarded?
Apologies to all for the barrage of questions, but I have done a reasonable amount of reading on the subject and am genuinely baffled by the almost mythical nature of the US constitution and the apparent gulf between perception and reality.