Reply #5: I have a few concerns about these ammendments...

[hughee99]

The voting rights amendment shouldn't be necessary, the rights are already there, if they were only to enforce the existing laws and fix the current voting issues.

Public education is already a right, but how do you determine that the quality of all public schools is equal? Along these lines what is the standard for "decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing" and a "clean, safe and sustainable environment"?

Although I support equal rights for women, I'm not aware of any "rights" a man has that a woman does not. I know that there are currently situations where woman are discriminate against, but there are already laws on the books that are being ignored.

How can you declare a right to full employment unless you start either mandating that companies hire people or have the federal government start hiring workers that it may not need to do it's job? How can one legislate "balanced economic growth"?

As to the electoral college, I do have some concerns with this as well. I don't necessarily want to keep it, but I do wonder how many people outside of major cities and large population states would even hear from an elected official since their area would not be of enough concern to elected officials to bother with. My other concern is voter fraud. Right now, although we can see that voter fraud is rampant, it is at least limited to the state. If you pick up an extra 100-200K votes in a state, you're gains are only limited to that state, whereas if we did this based on popular vote, one or two corrupt local election boards in large population centers could theoretically swing an entire national election. This can still happen under the current system, but in a close election, the number of cities that you could perform this kind of fraud in is relatively limited and therefore can be watched closely (although that doesn't seem to be happening now). For example, if the repukes in the last election were to manufacture an extra 500K votes in Texas, it would only affect the Texas results and not cancel out democratic gains in other states. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but I would like to see the voting process fixed before we go to the next step.

I guess for many of the other issues, I would need to read the actual text of the amendments to get some of the answers that I am looking for.