Social Conservatism vs. Political Conservatism

In the context of ant-gay marriage amendments, Daniel McCarthy's argument represents the distinction between somebody who is actually politically conservative and somebody who is motivated by the brand of "social conservatism" in which government regulation of private adult conduct is desirable:

The tendency of democracy, in values conflicts as well as economic policy, is to look to short-term, easy fixes that aren’t fixes at all: temporizing measures that placate voters and keep power-seeking coalitions together, but that leave the larger forces of culture to work their logic without citizens even being conscious of what’s happening. Amending fundamental law to ban gay marriage when Americans have already created a culture that insists on equality — in all things but wealth — only turns constitutions into op-ed pages.

For somebody who is politically conservative, the idea of entrenching social mores into a constitution should be troubling.

Amendment vs. Revision of the California Constitution

At Volokh, Dale Carpenter offers a thoughtful post on the distinction between amendment and revision of California's constitution, and whether Proposition 8 should properly be categorized as an amendment (requiring simple majority vote) or a revision (requiring "approval by two-thirds of each state house, followed by a majority vote"). Without having looked deeply at the issue, I suspect that the distinction was supposed to offer a procedural safeguard, but Carpenter raises interesting points about stripping away people's constitutional rights by majority vote.

Personally, I can't help but wonder if the amendment process itself should be amended (or is it revised). I recognize that it's a double-edged sword - if you make it harder for the people to amend the constitution, you effectively leave that power in the hands of legislatures who may be slow or reluctant to honor the wishes of a clear majority of the population on subjects like medical marijuana. But you also get bad policy, and it seems particularly bad tax policy, enshrined in the constitution, with the likely result that you will have financially mandated tax inequalities and budget problems. And you raise questions of whether matters arguably best addressed by legislation should be enshrined in a state constitution.

That is, you may try to fix a cyclical problem (e.g., budgeting issues) and end up creating a structural problem (a constitution that prevents the government from obtaining the tax revenues it needs to fulfill basic functions, or enshrining discriminatory tax policy that may deter immigration into a state or unduly burden a subset of state residents).