We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate.
And a system that requires a 3/4 supermajority of not even the population but the state legislatures (with the net effect that some states have a much greater say in pushing through or blocking amendments than others) is hardly a sane or sensible way to gauge public sentiment on such matters.
> We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate.
By the letter of the law, no. But in practice we do. The federal government is thus-far unwilling to defend their turf on this issue; they have de jure sovereignty but not de facto sovereignty. If a government finds itself politically incapable of exercising a sovereign power, then in a very real sense they no longer have it.
There are plenty of federal drug laws that are actively enforced in states where that stuff is otherwise legal. People mostly think about basic use & possession in this context, but there's so much else. E.g. buying a gun as a medical marijuana user is a risky proposition.
Try openly producing and selling. Multi-million dollar businesses operating in open plain view of the public and any federal agent. States legalize cannabis and the federal government in turn stops enforcing their laws against cannabis in those states, demonstrating that the states have de facto sovereignty to legalize drugs. They didn't just stop prosecution for "basic use" and possession, they no longer enforce their drug laws against growers and dealers either. They've essentially given up, for the time-being at least.
The fact that the same states are not also defying federal gun laws (with some interesting exceptions *cough* alaska *cough*) is another matter entirely. The federal government does seem to be more keen on exercising their sovereign powers when it comes to guns than with drugs.
I'm specifically referring to gun laws that pertain to "illegal drugs", so you can't really decouple the two like that. Not only the feds actively enforce these in all states, but even their forms that you have to fill explicitly state that cannabis is an illegal drug even if legalized in your state of residence. So, in effect, the states do not have full sovereignty even wrt drug legalization in all contexts.
You can say they don’t have the power all you’d like, but after 50 years of them enforcing it, you’re not likely to convince a judge they can’t do what they do.
But that's mostly due to a string of executives that are sympathetic or indifferent to that particular issue. A president that reignited the war on drugs or had outside political motive to go after what is mostly blue states and liberal people would likely succeed.
De facto sovereignty is in large part a function of what politicians are willing to do. Changes in leadership may change things, that goes without saying.
We do have state sovereignty on recreational drugs. State law enforcement officers are not required to enforce federal drug laws or cooperate with federal law enforcement personnel.
The Constitution is supposed to be stable and only change in response to broad political consensus. Requiring a supermajority for amendments is entirely appropriate.
Yes, you'll note that I said "the data will lead to a mandate for a constitutional amendment." My point is that the mechanisms that create and ratify constitutional amendments are broken for this purpose; not that we need a thing other than constitutional amendments.
Given the actual way bipartite or tripartite governments (at all levels — from municipal to federal) function in the real world, constitutional amendments only happen when there's a need to use an amendment to overridingly countermand law.
Constitutional amendments are almost never used for their original designed purpose — to pre-empt the ability to create law — because the legislative process is purely reactive, never proactive. Legislatures the world over only act when either corporate lobbying interests or outraged citizens demand they act.
The thing I'm saying doesn't exist, is a proactive branch of government that turns things that are currently "known to be desirable" but not yet "outraged about being taken away", into constitutional amendments protecting those things, before some law can be made somewhere that violates the implicit, intuitional, self-evident, but previously non-applicable right that the public believes it has. Like a right to anonymity in cash transactions.
Until a decade or two ago, nobody ever considered that "being able to transact anonymously via cash" needed to be thought of as a right. It was simply the only way things worked. There were no clear examples of it not working that way elsewhere in the world to serve as object lessons on why you'd need such a law.
Or, consider prohibition. Did the US really need to issue the 18th amendment, struggle for two decades, and then issue the 21st amendment to repeal it... when anyone who lived in America at any time during the two centuries before the rise of the temperance movement, could have seen that the public actually seems to consider itself to have a self-evident right to ingest mind-altering substances — and thereby, that there should be a constitutional limitation on laws which prohibit the production and sale of mind-altering substances? Yet America still doesn't have a constitutional amendment enshrining that self-evident right. Because there's no system for discovering "latent" public sentiment and enshrining it. If everybody thinks something, but nobody says that thing, then it never becomes law.
(If you think it's dumb to care about what "everyone thinks but nobody says" — why do you think democracy is built on secret voting? The public has a lot of things they want but aren't willing to say they want in front of others, for fear of reprisal in their local social-normative environment — including who they think would best represent them democratically!)
To your other points:
> The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures.
Legislatures at all levels are purely reactive; and therefore can't react to latent public sentiment, only to active demands.
> We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived problem with itself
What about every other democratic nation in the world that doesn't have this problem? (I'm Canadian, myself.) While America makes a good example for the failings of the reactive model for constitutional amendment, adding a proactive pipeline from latent public sentiment to constitutional amendment would be a change applicable to every country with a constitution. Not just democracies, actually; even constitutional monarchies.
That being said — everything I'm saying also applies, in the US, to state governments and their state charters/constitutions/other founding documents. State governments could have such a proactive body just like federal governments could. City governments could have such a proactive body. Heck, even corporations could have a proactive body to enshrine the interests of shareholders into the corporation's charter! (I bet there are corporations whose employees and shareholders would all prefer the corporation be transitioned to a B Corp with certain values held above profit — just not with enough outrage to consolidate a voice to make any coherent demands of the board of directors.)
> The thing I'm saying doesn't exist, is a proactive branch of government that turns things ... into constitutional amendments
I read your whole comment tree. I used to think something like this would be nice. An incarnation of some kind of wise intelligent force that could cut through the morass of mainstream politics in an efficient and principled way.
What I have realized is that mainstream politics is exactly this. The premise of your argument is wrong. There is no more proactive or efficient mechanism for accomplish collective action than our current political process. It is ruthlessly fast and efficient when you consider how accurately it reflects general sentiment in the country. We all, moreso the more intelligent we are, operate in a bubble of assumptions about what other people believe. Whatever you see on the news is a mindbogglyly low error match tailored to what the target audience believes. And all target audiences are covered in proportion to their size. We often hear that the extremes control the narrative, and you do hear from them a lot, but the overall picture painted by popular media and politics is the most accurate reflection of what people believe or will believe.
There's nothing we could construct that would outperform it.
I think we could tweak it to lower the error rate with some different voting schemes or rules, but at the end of the day there isn't some other paradigm that will beat it.
The corporate media doesn’t typically like to talk about that process since it is a threat to the entrenched powers that be.
The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures.
We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perceived problem with itself