What follows is the
beginning of an article in The Atlantic from several years ago
that makes a case for a new U.S. Constitution. Many thoughtful people have
called for a Constitutional Convention to replace our aging national framework.
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The U.S. Needs a New Constitution--Here's How to Write It
Let's face it: What worked well 224 years ago is no longer the
best we can do.
by Alex Seitz-Wald and National Journal, Nov. 2, 2013
America, we've got some bad
news: Our Constitution isn't going to make it. It's had 224 years of
commendable, often glorious service, but there's a time for everything, and the
government shutdown and permanent-crisis governance signal that it's time to
think about moving on. "No society can make a perpetual
constitution," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1789, the year
ours took effect. "The earth belongs always to the living generation and
not to the dead .… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires
at the end of 19 years." By that calculation, we're more than two
centuries behind schedule for a long, hard look at our most sacred of cows. And
what it reveals isn't pretty.
If men (and, finally,
women) as wise as Jefferson and Madison set about the task of writing a
constitution in 2013, it would look little like the one we have now. Americans
today can't agree on anything about Washington except that they want to
"blow up the place," in the words of former Republican Senator George
Voinovich as he left Congress, and maybe that thought isn't so radical.
Clocking
in at some 4,500 words—about the same length as the screenplay for an episode
of Two and a Half Men—and without serious modification since
18-year-olds got the vote in 1971, the Constitution simply isn't cut out for
21st-century governance. It's full of holes, only some of which have been
patched; it guarantees gridlock; and it's virtually impossible to change.
"It gets close to a failing grade in terms of 21st-century notions on
democratic theory," says University of Texas law professor Sanford
Levinson, part of the growing cadre of legal scholars who say the time has come
for a new constitutional convention.
Put
simply, we've learned a lot since 1787. What was for the Founders a kind of
providential revelation—designing, from scratch, a written charter and
democratic system at a time when the entire history of life on this planet
contained scant examples of either—has been worked into science. More than 700
constitutions have been composed since World War II alone, and other countries
have solved the very problems that cripple us today. It seems un-American to
look abroad for ways to change our sacred text, but the world's nations copied
us, so why not learn from them?
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