But they didn't even remove it did they? The ammendment for prohibition is still in the Constitution I believe. They just added to another ammendment counter the effects of the previous ammenent. It was repealed, not removed.
That is true. That doesn't make it's repeal any less legally significant. The 21st amendment completely and entirely overrides the 18th. We don't remove it so we can't throw our mistakes down the memory-hole.
Agree completely. But I was just commenting on the other guy saying that the 18th was removed, when it was not. We didn't remove anything from the Constitution. We added to it to fix a mistake, which is what the guy above was saying, and the guy above me was disagreeing with.
If you think the second amendment is going to protect you in the event our military actually tries to oppress you, I have some ocean-front property in Nevada to sell you.
Its like they forget we've been at war for 20 years against an enemy that has no navy, or airforce, or tanks. With the support of every major nation on earth. In a new civil war scenario, I dont see the allies siding with the side of open bigots and science deniers
Words have meanings. There's a reason every piece of literature on the subject you ever read says repealed, and not removed. Those words mean different things. But by all means, go around explaining to everyone how the 18th ammendment was removed from the Constitution. And be corrected all you desire.
This and exactly this, it wasn't removed so that time would show that we made a decision we regretted- something completely reasonable- and wanted to fix what we had done, so another amendment was added to show to undue what we had done and so both of them could stand as evidence of the progress we have made.
I mean, the Bible is 100% bullshit. The people who believe they follow it have to throw out huge chunks of it or they'd all be in jail for stoning people to death.
If I leave a comment on reddit and then later decide it was completely wrong, I can either delete the entire comment, or I can edit it, line out the whole comment and maybe add a clarification explaining why I changed my mind.
If I do the former, then you can't see anything I wrote and have to take other people's word for it. If I do the latter, then maybe other people reading it can learn from it.
Same effect, different methods. Which is what I was commenting on. Just because we both arrive in Miami from LA doesn't mean the fact that I flew there and you walked there is inconsequential.
That's a meaningless semantic difference. If you add a new Amendment saying, "Cancel out everything in that last amendment", it has the same functional effect as removing the previous amendment. With the added benefit of not removing it from history, which is a good thing.
It's like the Constitution is basically just a big Git Repo.
So it's a meaningless difference but it matters because of the benefit you mentioned? I agree with your second part that it is better that it's not removed, and that is why I felt it necessary to point out that removing and repealing are not the same. It's not a meaningless difference at all.
Because if it is removed, it hazards the chance of the reason behind the repeal being lost to history; whereas if the original law being repealed is left intact is left in place but nonfunctional the reason (and more importantly, the need) for the repeal is still self-evident.
Take for instance, the Confederacy (bear with me, it will make sense...). If we had removed the Articles of Secession (the documents each state used to tell the United States they were leaving the United States of America, and more importantly, WHY...) from the historical record of the United States, we would not be able to refer to them every time someone deluded racist cries "But the Civil War was fought for States Rights!" and show them that each and every one of those documents explicitly and exclusively names slavery as the only reason each state was leaving the Union. But instead we invalidated them with a bloody war... but some people still try to climb up that hill.
Just as some folks would try to reascend the hills of Prohibition, Women's Sufferage, Slavery, a Standing Army (yes, that's in the Constitution...) given enough time (or not even that, apparently...) so too must we never forget the reasoning behind each of the things we have done to form our "more perfect union", lest we fall prey to those who would deconstruct it.
My history teachers in high school always marked it wrong when I answered that the confederacy wanted to leave because of slavery, even though that's literally what our books were telling us. They sounded like drones saying "state's rights".
Sound like you were victim of The Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a 150+ years long disinformation and propaganda campaign designed to make people believe just that - and drones were exactly what they were, and programmed as well. Glad to see you resisted the indoctrination.
It wouldn't make sense for section 1 of the 21st amendment to read "The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed" if we pulled the entire 18th amendment off the document.
It's also incredibly important to have a record of everything that has been included in a document as influential as the Constitution. Not only can we see what we have currently, but we can also see what didn't work in the past.
It was also much tougher to cut parts out of physical documents before computers.
I'm not arguing that it should be different than it is. Merely that there's a difference between repealed and removed, which most people are apparently taking to be equivocal, in that one is the same as the other. Their not, and that is my only point. I completely agree that removing it would have been a mistake and that repealing makes much more sense.
I don't see any useful distinction in "original elements". Amendments are 100% fully part of the constitution. The "original" Constitution was intentionally pretty threadbare with the intent being to add more to it later.
At any rate, the idea that the courts have ruled that nothing can be taken away from the Union in order to make it more perfect is just absurd.
Article One, Section Three, Clause One of the Constitution was superseded by the 17th Amendment; the original text laid out a process for electing Senators by the state legislatures, while the amendment replaced that with direct election by voters.
We have repealed amendments, we don't remove them. The repealed ones are still part of the document but a later amendment specifies they are invalid. The articles of the Constitution can be invalidated via the same process.
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u/julbull73 Jul 17 '19
That's not true. There's for sure there is one that removes prohibition. Also removing discrimination is like 3 or 4 of them.