Legislators who respect the rights of their constituents would vote 'present' and then go fishing. Since the House membership was capped in 1929, I suppose this only gets fixed through a general strike of the people, or a crack-up divorce in a decade or so.
> Since the House membership was capped in 1929, I
About that. I discovered a really neat hack a few years ago, but I don't have the juice to pull it off.
Constitutional amendments never expire and they can't be canceled, as long as that's not written into the wording itself. The ERA for instance, needed to be ratified within 7 years, or it became invalid. But old amendments didn't do that... so they wait around for centuries.
And there's a particular amendment that was part of the original bill of rights (there were 12, of those 10 were ratified more or less immediately, and the 11th in the 1990s). This amendment demands that there must be one representative for ever 50,000 constituents. And it's already been ratified my much of New England (plus Kentucky!).
If you happened to live in say, I dunno, Nebraska... you could conceivably get the ball rolling just by going in to talk to your state legislator. Call up his local office, ask if there's a time where you could come in and see him for 5 minutes, and then pour your heart out about how important it is to you.
If he even brings it to a vote, that might be the sort of viral kick-in-the-pants it would need. But if it were ratified by your state, that would pique the interest of other states.
You can check out what I've said, Wikipedia is sufficient to confirm all of it.
That site's actually wrong. I'm not sure what its purpose is (it does ask for money). If they think the amendment is defective, there's no point in this. It's impossible to get a new amendment past Congress at this point. This only works because this particular amendment is already past Congress, and can't be recalled.
We should ratify the amendment. Little more is needed.
If you wanted this, rather than donating to some sort of weird counter-operation, you'd go look up your state legislator (two of them, really, upper or lower house). Choose the one that seems most sympathetic, or maybe just choose both, and go talk to them. Dress nicely. Get a haircut before. Spend 5 minutes, and appeal to whatever their political sensibilities are. While still being friendly, make it clear that your continued support rests on their ability to get the state legislature to move towards ratifying it.
And if you know anyone else interested in things like this, convince them to do the same.
This is probably one of those cases where as few as 4 or 5 people could totally change the face of American politics, and relatively quickly (within the next 10 years or so).
About that. I discovered a really neat hack a few years ago, but I don't have the juice to pull it off.
Constitutional amendments never expire and they can't be canceled, as long as that's not written into the wording itself. The ERA for instance, needed to be ratified within 7 years, or it became invalid. But old amendments didn't do that... so they wait around for centuries.
And there's a particular amendment that was part of the original bill of rights (there were 12, of those 10 were ratified more or less immediately, and the 11th in the 1990s). This amendment demands that there must be one representative for ever 50,000 constituents. And it's already been ratified my much of New England (plus Kentucky!).
If you happened to live in say, I dunno, Nebraska... you could conceivably get the ball rolling just by going in to talk to your state legislator. Call up his local office, ask if there's a time where you could come in and see him for 5 minutes, and then pour your heart out about how important it is to you.
If he even brings it to a vote, that might be the sort of viral kick-in-the-pants it would need. But if it were ratified by your state, that would pique the interest of other states.
You can check out what I've said, Wikipedia is sufficient to confirm all of it.