Shadow1980 said:
I'd like to believe that, but the difference between now and 1787 was that back then our leaders actually had a far more pressing reason to pass a new constitution. The previous one, the Articles of Confederation, was woefully inadequate as a governing document. The United States was barely able to govern itself and was at risk of falling apart at the seams. Despite all the recent bouts of secessionist bluster, the U.S. is a much more cohesive unit, and that's thanks to our current Constitution. The Articles of Confederation was such a lousy constitution that it lasted only six years before it was decided that a replacement was needed. Despite its own flaws, the current Constitution has been in force for 226 years, so it's been doing its job fairly well. As there is no pressing need in the form of a country that was barely a cohesive unit to pass a new constitution, a new Constitutional Convention would likely fail due to gridlock. Both parties would be intractable on a great many issues, and without any sort of impetus to pressure them to compromise on things they'd never come to an agreement. Hell, they'd probably never come to an agreement on a mere amendment to the current constitution if it touched on any major issue. For example, Bernie Sanders wants an amendment that would overturn the abominable Citizens United decision, and while the vast majority of Americans want significant changes to how political campaigns are financed, too many in both the federal and state Congresses are comfortable with the current status quo, and thus such a campaign finance. I would also think that many Democrats would like an amendment that modifies the Second Amendment in some fashion, though support for more stringent forms of gun law appears to have diminshed over the decades. Some liberals might also want an amendment banning the death penalty, even though most Americans still support it (and even among liberals opinions are split on the issue; even some of the most liberal Americans would likely, at least in principle, support the death penalty for extremely heinous acts like terrorism). Meanwhile, most conservative Republicans would like amendments to ban same-sex marriage (most Americans approve of such marriages now), abortion (only one-fifth of the people support banning it entirely), and burning the American flag (a 50-50 split among Americans, I think). None of these proposals from either side would ever get ratified. Not only would they probably not come up for an actual vote in Congress, but they wouldn't even get the supermajority in both houses needed to send them to the states for ratification, and not enough states would ratify them in the first place. Hell, we couldn't even pass an amendment that would give DC citizens full voting rights and representation in Congress, which you think would have been a good and decent thing, but as usual the people of DC got the shaft. And that was 30 years ago when "bipartanship" still had yet to become a dirty word in American politics. There are still amendments that were sent to the states that are capable of being ratified today (the Congressional Apportionment Amendment and Child Labor Amendment) that may or may not be worth getting the states that haven't ratified them to reconsider them, but have spent many decades collecting dust, as it were. All of the hot-button issues of today—and let's be honest, what isn't a hot-button issue these days?—would inevitably come up in a modern-day Constitutional Convention, and I'd imagine there would be quite a few in the Convention that would not capitulate on anything, perhaps enough to keep the entire crafting process in a perpetual state of limbo. There isn't even any universal agreement in Congress on whether the government should do the most basic things, like pay its bills or even fund itself. It would take an act of God for an amendment designed to actually fix something broken with our government (assuming said problem cannot be fixed by appropriate legislature). Getting a new Constitution passed? Forget about it. But I honestly think that's for the best. The Articles of Confederation quite frankly sucked as a constitution and deserved to be replaced. Meanwhile, though our current constitution has its faults, it works for the most part. Oddly enough, the vague language is perhaps what let us do things on the national level that have improved our country, and it provides enough wiggle room to where legislation alone is enough to solve most problems (giving themselves and their successors that wiggle room is also perhaps another reason why the Philadelphia Convention put so much vague language in the Consitution in the first place, and why neither the Framers nor the Constitution itself ever gave any specific rules on how to interpret it). Sure, that leads to continuous and often fierce and acrimonious discussion over what is and is not constitutional (and the standards of what is or isn't constitutional itself shifts over time), but perhaps that debate is better than being shackled with something highly specific and utterly immutable. Even Thomas Jefferson opined in a letter to Samuel Kerchval:
The most broken or erroneous parts of the Constitution as originally written were modified or deleted by subsequent amendments a long time ago. Today, amendments are really only necessary anymore to overturn Supreme Court decisions, but even those can themselves be overturned by future Supreme Court decisions. Our national government may be dysfunctional (what else is new?), but there's nothing so utterly broken so as to require completely rewriting the Constitution from the ground up. |
Bravo.
