John Galt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Actually, the Constitutional Convention was supposed to amend the > Articles, and they did: they replaced them lock stock and barrel. They > did nothing to other documents: the Barbary papers were not repudiated: in > fact, in 1795, the succeeding Emperor of Morocco acknowleged them via > letter to the President.
Right, but the Convention did not amend the articles by the procedure provided in the Articles, it made up its own procedure, and by the time nine states had gone with it, it was untenable for remaining states to refuse. The transition from the Articles to the Constitution did not proceed according to the legal regime in place; it went through completely contrary to the method stated in the Articles for such amendments. There were excellent reasons for this, of course; I'm a fan of the result, not some grouse wishing we still were under the Articles. The theory of the time was that the Articles represented a compact between States; the Constitution was to be a direct Constitution of all the people of the United States (as indeed the Preamble puts it), not a compact between States. None of this, I think, has anything to tell us about what action we ought to take today with respect to amending the Debian Constitution. Thomas
