That's the thing Republicans say to justify what they're currently doing.

Here's the second clause of the 18th amendment (prohibition of alcohol), ratified in 1919 and repealed by the 21st:

> The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

In other words, in 1919 it was generally understood that the federal government didn't have the power to so much as prohibit alcohol, and they needed a constitutional amendment to grant that power (without withdrawing it from the states through preemption).

Most of what the federal government currently does was intended to be unconstitutional, until FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court if they didn't knuckle under and approve his unconstitutional acts, and then they did. Likewise Roe v. Wade, initiated by the Court itself in a year the left held the majority and then kept that way for half a century even though its logic was muddled and inconsistent with those same opinions they themselves wanted that said the government does have the power to regulate healthcare providers. Likewise gun control, which the constitution not only didn't give the federal government the power to do, it explicitly constrained them from it.

You can think that any of these things would be good policy, but without breaking the rules to enact them you'd need to amend the constitution. So never mind 20 years, this has been going on for a lot longer than that.

But if you abandon the rules because it's expedient, and then they abandon the rules because you did, and then you abandon even more of the rules because they did, we all end up in a place nobody likes.

All such arguments about the constitution and federal power are just a waste of time. The constitution is so riddled with flaws that there's little point in attempting to save the good parts. We absolutely should throw out a large proportion of the "rules" in the constitution. The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense. It's just an arbitrary jurisdictional distraction from the substantive content of policies. Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context is like there's a basketball game where fans, coaches, and players are all kicking each other in the nuts and you're worried about calling double dribble.

> The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense.

There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.

And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.

> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context

The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.

> My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.

I would say the problem is people doing bad things, and the rules are disconnected from any substantive connection to what is good or bad, and from any essential connection to the idea that the people (not any apparatus of government) is the final arbiter of what should be done.

The problem with appealing to "the people" is that they don't all agree what's good or bad, and indeed will give different answers to what is substantively the same question depending on how it's framed or what mechanism is being used to measure their preferences.

You also need some rules to temper tyrannical majorities unless "51% of the vote means you get to oppress the minority" is your idea of a good time.

And a lot of these are in the nature of a Ulysses pact. When nobody wants anybody to censor them, and everybody knows that they won't always be in the majority, we can form a general consensus that we all agree not to censor the opposition when we're in the majority and in exchange they can't censor anyone when they're in the majority. For that to work you need an effective mechanism to constrain the majority or some fool is going to steer the ship into the rocks as soon as they hear the Siren song.

Then the broad consensus gets written into the constitution which in turn requires broad consensus to change. If nobody's playing dirty.

Whereas if everybody's playing dirty then pretty clearly the checks and balances aren't working and we need some better ones.

I don't disagree with most of what you said. But a tyranny of the majority is still better than a tyranny of the minority.

And yeah, pretty clearly the alleged checks and balances we have weren't the right ones. The problem is that the system we have set up enshrines the difficulty of changing those checks and balances as one of its primary features. That's why I think we're not going to get anywhere by trying to chip away at the edges of our problem within the existing constitutional framework.