I don’t think the Constitution at all needs a rewrite. I think the ideals of the Framers are just as important and valid today as they were when they were put to paper. Our problems come not from inadequacies in the Constitution, but from our own inadequacy to follow its teachings.
As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It’s clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal behaviors and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.
For goodness sake, judicial review isn’t even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. “our own inadequacy to follow its teachings”). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don’t matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious “patch” amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.
The thing is, for the past 50 years, it seems everyone has become afraid of touching it. There have been so many ammendments, the constitution is made to be changed, get on with it
In fairness, one of the issues is that there’s an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they’re constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.
I got a feeling that something akin to the Great Depression is coming soon, and that there will be a repeat of the late 20s early 30s… could a new Roosevelt even appear again today?
The problem is-- who is going to re-write it? This is a serious question. Do you really think a consensus of those currently running the US government could do better than the Framers?
No they won’t. But someone will. Because someone would need to. Probably a lot of people. And the states would need to ratify it. If you can get all the states on board with something, it might be better than what we currently have. It might not.
But that doesn’t matter. What we have today is broken. Unquestionably, it needs a major overhaul. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the United States of America. The Framers weren’t special people. They were ordinary men. No smarter than us today. And we understand the world today much much better than they ever could. So I’d bet on any random one of us, over them.
We come down to the same underlying problem that we have today- the people of the country are not actively engaged in the political process, not nearly to the same degree the Framers intended.
The difference between those people who wrote our constitution and the people we have today is those people recognized the importance of what they were doing. They were willing to stand up and fight and die if necessary to create a free society. Today the inheritors of that free society largely can’t even be bothered to vote, let alone put in an hour or two of research to figure out who to vote for.
So I will agree with you that the wording of the original document is imprecise, and a lot of what we now call constitutional law comes as much if not more from various Court decisions than from the document itself.
But given the situation that we have currently, I am genuinely curious what you think could be improved? Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution, knowing the amount of influence various people and groups and companies have over our political process, a. What do you think could or should be changed or improved, and b. How likely is it do you think that would actually happen without the process being corrupted?
Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution
We don’t know who. Members of the current government certainly wouldn’t. They have too much invested in the current system. They’d do everything they could to fight it. No revolution ever included officials or influencers from the old government.
As for what changes would be needed? That would be a massive list. Heavily dependent on details.
Generally speaking:
More explicit guardrails around corruption.
Less centralized power in the executive branch. Maybe multiple “Presidents”
A mechanism for the public to unilaterally recall an elected offical.
Intrabranch enforcement of powers over each other. So the courts can’t just be ignored.
That’s just the high flyers off the top of my head.
I completely agree on corruption. And I would love a uniform mechanism for elected officials to be recalled.
That said, the rest of what you described I don’t think it is due to problems with the Constitution, but rather with the people in government. The executive branch has seized a huge amount of power not because the Constitution granted it but because the other branches let them have it and do not appropriately enforce their own checks and balances against the executive.
The dysfunction of Congress is a primary issue. But that is because the idiot voters keep electing the same assholes with no research until they literally die of old age. The result in Congress is too busy serving their own ends to really exert power over the executive or properly manage the courts. That is not a constitutional problem.
And the courts make rulings all the time that get ignored, but judicial doesn’t hold anyone’s feet to the fire. Also not a constitutional problem.
I think you could fix a lot of this pretty simply with an amendment or two. 1. Voting day is a paid national holiday. 2. Term limits in Congress. 3. Legal prohibition against gerrymandering.
4. An explicit process to recall any politician or judge in any federal position- 1. Need a petition signed by 5% of their constituency, or 1 million people if federal. 2. A majority vote 6 weeks after the petition is approved.
I don’t think the Constitution at all needs a rewrite. I think the ideals of the Framers are just as important and valid today as they were when they were put to paper. Our problems come not from inadequacies in the Constitution, but from our own inadequacy to follow its teachings.
As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It’s clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal behaviors and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.
For goodness sake, judicial review isn’t even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. “our own inadequacy to follow its teachings”). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don’t matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious “patch” amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.
The thing is, for the past 50 years, it seems everyone has become afraid of touching it. There have been so many ammendments, the constitution is made to be changed, get on with it
In fairness, one of the issues is that there’s an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they’re constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.
I got a feeling that something akin to the Great Depression is coming soon, and that there will be a repeat of the late 20s early 30s… could a new Roosevelt even appear again today?
Not a chance. The right is too comfortable telling blatant lies, and the public is too eager to believe their lies for that to happen.
The Constitution isn’t a holy text with “teachings”.
Even the guys who wrote it, thought it had a lot of problems and didn’t think it would last 50 years.
It realy should be completely be re-written. With an expiration date built in, to ensure it gets re-written in the future.
The problem is-- who is going to re-write it? This is a serious question. Do you really think a consensus of those currently running the US government could do better than the Framers?
No they won’t. But someone will. Because someone would need to. Probably a lot of people. And the states would need to ratify it. If you can get all the states on board with something, it might be better than what we currently have. It might not.
But that doesn’t matter. What we have today is broken. Unquestionably, it needs a major overhaul. Nothing lasts forever. Not even the United States of America. The Framers weren’t special people. They were ordinary men. No smarter than us today. And we understand the world today much much better than they ever could. So I’d bet on any random one of us, over them.
We come down to the same underlying problem that we have today- the people of the country are not actively engaged in the political process, not nearly to the same degree the Framers intended.
The difference between those people who wrote our constitution and the people we have today is those people recognized the importance of what they were doing. They were willing to stand up and fight and die if necessary to create a free society. Today the inheritors of that free society largely can’t even be bothered to vote, let alone put in an hour or two of research to figure out who to vote for.
So I will agree with you that the wording of the original document is imprecise, and a lot of what we now call constitutional law comes as much if not more from various Court decisions than from the document itself. But given the situation that we have currently, I am genuinely curious what you think could be improved? Knowing the players in question who would be writing the new constitution, knowing the amount of influence various people and groups and companies have over our political process, a. What do you think could or should be changed or improved, and b. How likely is it do you think that would actually happen without the process being corrupted?
We don’t know who. Members of the current government certainly wouldn’t. They have too much invested in the current system. They’d do everything they could to fight it. No revolution ever included officials or influencers from the old government.
As for what changes would be needed? That would be a massive list. Heavily dependent on details.
Generally speaking:
That’s just the high flyers off the top of my head.
I completely agree on corruption. And I would love a uniform mechanism for elected officials to be recalled.
That said, the rest of what you described I don’t think it is due to problems with the Constitution, but rather with the people in government. The executive branch has seized a huge amount of power not because the Constitution granted it but because the other branches let them have it and do not appropriately enforce their own checks and balances against the executive.
The dysfunction of Congress is a primary issue. But that is because the idiot voters keep electing the same assholes with no research until they literally die of old age. The result in Congress is too busy serving their own ends to really exert power over the executive or properly manage the courts. That is not a constitutional problem.
And the courts make rulings all the time that get ignored, but judicial doesn’t hold anyone’s feet to the fire. Also not a constitutional problem.
I think you could fix a lot of this pretty simply with an amendment or two. 1. Voting day is a paid national holiday. 2. Term limits in Congress. 3. Legal prohibition against gerrymandering. 4. An explicit process to recall any politician or judge in any federal position- 1. Need a petition signed by 5% of their constituency, or 1 million people if federal. 2. A majority vote 6 weeks after the petition is approved.
But didn’t one of them say we need a revolution ever 10 or 20 years?
That was Jefferson—he wrote the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.