DEBATENATE

Topics / America

The challenge

“The Constitution is outdated”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. The Constitution isn't outdated. It's ignored, and that's a different problem. It already has an update button. It's called Article Five, and we've pushed it twenty-seven times. What it doesn't have is a clause letting judges update it for you. That's the living Constitution idea, and it means your rights are whatever five lawyers feel this year. Read the words the way the people who ratified them understood them, and they still work. In twenty fourteen a unanimous Supreme Court said police generally need a warrant to search your phone. Words from seventeen ninety-one, guarding a gadget from this century. You'll say amending is too hard. In nineteen seventy-one the voting age amendment went through in under four months. Let me ask you this. Which right in the Bill of Rights has expired? A good foundation isn't outdated just because the house got Wi-Fi.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The Constitution has its own repair process, and Americans have used it to fix its worst flaws. Change it by amendment, not by judges' moods.

    The Constitution has been amended 27 times under Article V, including the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and the Nineteenth Amendment barring sex discrimination in voting.

  2. Read by what the words meant, its principles cover technology the founders never imagined.

    In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that police generally need a warrant to search the digital contents of a cell phone seized during an arrest.

  3. When the country actually agrees, the amendment process moves fast.

    The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, was proposed by Congress in March 1971 and ratified that July.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: It's too hard to amend: there hasn't been a new amendment since 1992, so we're stuck with old rules.

Nate: Hard is the point. Rights you can change with a simple majority aren't rights. They're favors. Making the whole country agree keeps one election, or one bench of judges, from rewriting the rules for everybody. That stability is what protects the minority from the mood of the moment.

The lines

Sources

  1. U.S. Constitution, Article V and Amendments I through XXVII (1787)
  2. Supreme Court of the United States, Riley v. California (2014)
  3. U.S. Congress, Twenty-sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1971)

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