As almost a full year and five hundred pages of the election season and thread draw to a close in a week, we can start to reflect on the whole rollicking ride of the journey.
Over that time, one theme that has kept recurring has been the flaws of the U. S. Constitution. Now don't get me wrong: I adore the U. S. Constitution. The American government works on an entirely different engine from just about every country I can think of, but it still works- and it's been working like that for two hundred and twenty-two years. During that time, it's been able to support the country during its transition from an 18th-century agrarian country of four million, to a 19th-century rising industrial power of fifty million, to its current incarnation as the world's 300 million-plus strong sole (though not for long!) superpower, surviving western expansion, civil war, the forcible end of half the country's economic engine, mass immigration, two world wars, a depression, and the Cold War. And it's done this- if we count the Bill of Rights as being part of the original document, which for most intents and purposes they are- only having had to be edited thirteen times, one of which is no longer in force, and many of the others of which are decidedly minor.
Still, there's a vocal number of us who think it could use a bit of tweaking. Tomorrow, when I have a lot of time and nothing to do with it, I'll write another post to expand on my own ideas, but for now, here's some of the stuff that's come up most:
-It's becoming increasingly clear that the Electoral College is an egregious violation of the principle of "one man, one vote", and probably needs to be changed- not necessarily abolished completely, but changed.
-Many of us have expressed disapproval of the two-party system, and the huge barrier to third-party entry. I'll expand on this later, too.
-The original Constitution's biggest oversight, I would argue, was that the Framers assumed political parties wouldn't form, so the system was never built to accommodate them; the result has been that when parties have worked, they've worked well, but when they haven't, such as the current time of writing, they've been a huge bug in the system.
-Division of rights between the feds, the states and the people. Man, if there's anything I'd like to go back in time and make the Framers be more clear on, this would probably be the one. Obviously they couldn't have foreseen particular questions like drug use or abortion, but we've currently got a system where the interstate commerce clause is used as a necessary loophole for the feds to deal with whatever they need to deal with, even if it's not necessarily all that focused on interstate commerce. That's not a bad thing, per se, but it's very easily abused and should probably be expanded on.
-The population of the United States has increased by a factor of eighty from the signing of the Constitution. Quantity, as we know, really is its own quality, and maybe there are areas where something that worked in a small country doesn't work so well today. I don't know; let's talk about it.
-Voting systems. 'Nuff said. Let's try not to cause a flamewar with this, shall we?
The purpose of this isn't necessarily to create an end-product full proposed Constitution redo, although goodness knows we have enough political junkies who might take a crack at writing them from scratch, including myself, and those are certainly more than welcome to make their appearances. Rather, the point is to discuss what works, what doesn't, and what could work better. It's about the journey- it has to be, since I don't think we'll ever come up with a destination.
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Topic: First Bay Twelve Symposium on Constitutional Rewriting (Read 14941 times)