© Spencer Margosian 2019 These are the two opening statements which I wrote for the We the People State Competition, representing Wando High in Mt Pleasant, SC. We would go on to present 6.1, but not 3.1.

1. MASTER COPY
Unit 3.1
James Madison is correct in his statement. The constitutional amendment process may be
long and arduous, but considering the weight of an Amendment post-passage, and the resultant
lasting repercussions behind passing a problematic one, it must be this way to preserve the
sanctity of the legal system. Specifically, this is because the amendment process has potential to
undermine judicial review and leave majority rule unchecked.
In its current form, surviving the amendment process is undoubtedly a massive feat, but
this extreme difficulty must be kept so in order to maintain a proper system of checks and
balances. Specifically, making amendments easier to pass threatens the sanctity of judicial
review by making it easier to overrule the court. Ever since the landmark case Marbury v.
Madison in 1803, interpreting the Constitution has been an established right and duty of the1
Supreme Court, and the only effective way for the government to override the court’s
interpretation is to pass an amendment . Although this may be appealing in the short term, in the2
long term it effectively repeals judicial review and threatens the checks and balances in our
democracy as a whole. The Supreme Court was designed specifically to act as a higher, more
educated, authority in the legal system, and thus has in the past made a number of decisions that
have not agreed with public opinion: examples of this include Edwards v. Aguillard , in which3
the teaching of creation science was barred in schools, and Roe v. Wade , in which the right to an4
1
Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/marbury.html
2
A contemporary potential example of this is in the thirty-one state coalition formed to request an Illinois
Brick revisit. While the states themselves cannot directly overrule, they can request a revisit under a
friendlier court- what this means is yet to be determined, especially in the context of Apple Inc. v. Pepper,
for which a judgement i expected in early 2019.
3
EvA summary, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/482/578
4
RvW summary, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113%26amp

2. abortion was affirmed for the sake of privacy. Possibly the most important of these
‘controversial’ rulings, however, is one that today people look at with reverence: Brown v. Board
of Education.
Brown v. Board, possibly the most landmark yet controversial case in recent memory,
was the case to de facto overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and the statute of ‘separate but equal’
accommodations for persons of color. The decision was made at the right time, empowering the
Civil Rights movement to carry on through the 1960s and culminate in the Civil Rights Acts, but
had ‘separate but equal’ been an amendment rather than precedent, it would have been
impossible for the court to draw its conclusion, and, without popular support, it is possible that
‘separate but equal’ may have lived on for many years more. In short, some matters are of
enough importance that they must be left to a higher body. In the United States, the Supreme
Court serves this purpose, and to preserve its integrity, we must preserve the amendment process.
The amendment process is one of just two official steps , but the technically short process5
is virtually always belabored with negotiations and alterations that trim the average seventy-five6
amendments introduced per congress to just twenty-seven certified since the Constitution’s7
adoption. Though they may be introduced by constitutional convention, all amendments in US
history have been products of Congress, in which a House or Senate committee drafts a proposal
and brings it to a vote in its parent chamber. If it passes there with a two-thirds majority, the still
5
Nat’l Archive, https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution
6
Exception: 26th amendment (Voting age 18) took 3mo 8d to ratify--a record.
7
PEW/Drew Desilver,
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/04/12/a-look-at-proposed-constitutional-amendments-and-ho
w-seldom-they-go-anywhere/

3. MASTER COPY
Unit 6.1
Younger voters absolutely have a responsibility to understand government. As the
proportion of younger voters in the electorate increases, the importance of their political
education increases directly. As younger groups gain influence, it is imperative that their choices
be won fairly and legitimately by political interests, and this can only be ensured by ensuring
political proficiency in the face of media misinformation and poor education. In 2016, a study
conducted by Pew concluded that sixty-four percent of Americans felt that misinformation
causes “a great deal of confusion” about current events--a reality unprecedented before the rise
of social media and thus one not felt by older generations. In this sense, the importance of
independent political knowledge is greater than ever before.
Perhaps even more important than current events, though, is a public knowledge of the
Constitution and founding documents-- policy changes, and they don't. As it would figure, they
aren’t remembered well, either. The APPC determined in a 2017 study that a concerning number
of Americans fail to recall basic constitutional provisions, the scariest figure being that
thirty-seven percent failed to recount a single freedom guaranteed by the first amendment. The
real solution to this problem is better civic education, but in its absence, it is up to the citizenry to
fill this gap.
The compulsory vote has been incredibly effective in numerous advanced democracies
around the world, and is worth considering for US implementation. However, before such a
system can be applied successfully, it must be closely analyzed for its merits and drawbacks. At
the European Consortium for Political Research, Dr. Jean-Benoit Pilet analyzed the mandatory

4. vote in this fashion, using Belgium’s system as a case study. In his research, Pilet immediately
recognized that among all public campaigns geared towards increasing voter turnout, the
compulsory voting system was by a wide margin the most effective, albeit the most
controversial, solution. This efficacy is something that all modern democracies strive for,
regardless of methodology, and it very actively protects against minority seizure of power by
ensuring the general public is not undercut by “[the] radicals, [and the] excessive and violent
citizens who don’t have to be pushed to vote”.
Perhaps the most undervalued feature of the Belgian system is actually its relatively poor
enforcement. Dr. Pilet notes this in his writing: out of nearly half a million abstaining voters in
the 1985 election cycle, less than five hundred were actually sanctioned by the court, making the
law “more a moral than a legal obligation”. (This impotence, however, may be a double-edged
sword: approximately thirty percent of respondents to a 2004 poll stated that they would not vote
in elections were voting not mandatory.)
Much like democracy itself, mandatory voting may not be a perfect system, but it remains
an important strategy in the democratic arsenal. It is a system that must be respected, by all
means, but not one that should be feared.
In the US, noncitizen voting in local elections is a model of why federalism advances
classical republicanism. By design, a federal system delegates powers between the tiers of
government, ranging from national to municipal in their jurisdictions. These explicit
jurisdictions, while designed to reserve state powers, are not exclusively beneficial to the states.
They have in the past and continue to serve the federal government by acting as ‘laboratories of
democracy’, or experimental areas for potential policies, such as healthcare and environmental