Thread by @kellygerling

@WilliamHogeland 1/ The part that still is able “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” are the institutions/processes created in Articles 1-6. The Senate, Presidency/Executive, The Supreme Court, the States, are there to get abolishment and ratification (06-21-1788) & to...

@WilliamHogeland 2/ ...block the popular will as it might be expressed by the House of the People as a whole, directly. The amendments you refer to expand those incorporated into the set of individuals with individual rights, but don’t alter the divide-and-rule, confuse-and-rule design features.

@WilliamHogeland 3/ Nor do they, nor other amendments of the post-1791 15, nor the subsequent SCOTUS rulings, recover & amplify the block, stop and remove functions of direct democracy in the Preamble, the Declaration, and the VA Declaration of Rights that affirm the entire democratic tradition.

@WilliamHogeland 4/ So to achieve what New Zealand has achieved with their constitutional design, and many other nations, to closely match the popular will with implemented public policy, the American citizenry needs to recreate the agreement between ourselves by which we self-govern ourselves.

@WilliamHogeland 5/ We can do that directly via a third Constitution. Our states have had 233 state constitutional assemblies leading to over 150 new constitutions and over 6000 new amendments, according to John Dinan’s “The American State Constitutional Tradition.” We are long past due for that.

@WilliamHogeland 6/ Amar’s conclusion, consistent with what Sanford Levinson, Richard Albert @dhlazare advocate, is via a Democratic People’s Constitutional Assembly or DPCA, or what Lazare calls a constituent assembly, along these lines: jacobinmag.com/2017/01/consti…

@WilliamHogeland @threadreaderapp unroll