Looking at what's happening right now, and the conversations that have been taking place in recent years, I have to wonder if it isn't time for a change. It's an idea that has been rattling around in my head for a while now, but now I think it really needs saying...with an analogy.

The United States needs a new operating system.

The current version, Constitution, is slow, overly-complicated, and constantly breaking down. Don't get me wrong, it was great for its time, way better than the first one, but it hasn't aged all that well. New programs require so much work to be made compatible that they're barely functional by the time they're operational; worse, they come riddled with added features nobody asked for, often allocating resources to functions that only benefit a few people. It's gotten a lot of patches over the years, but it still doesn't run very well, and tech support is completely useless, because it can't make up its mind about what the manual says to do. Worst of all, a lot of the new hardware is creating even more problems, and now the whole thing is overheating...and I think I've tortured that analogy enough.

The point is, we need a new system. Call it Constitution 2.0. One that has everything we liked about the first one, but simpler, more responsive, and easier to use, without all the exploits and useless add-ons. Something that more adequately meets our needs, rather than the needs of people that lived hundreds of years ago.

I dunno, that's just what I'm thinking.

I would rather the government actually follow the original before we even consider hitting the reset button.

In what way?

read decline of the west

it gives a detail look in the the future by studying the past

Caesars are coming

The constitution is working fine. It's the special interest that needs rebooting. If you want efficiency, get a dictatorship.  A new constitution would lack basic rights, checks, balances, and limits of executive power.  You want this?  You think we can trust our politicians to write a better one than our forefathers?   

"Useless add-ons"? I hope you don't mean the Amendments. :P

I guess the founding fathers were delusional then.

If you think your constitution is bloated and hard to use, check out ours, still warm from coming out of the oven on 1988. It's literally the size of an early Harry Potter book.

I would expect a modern constitution to be longer. The U.S. constitution would certainly be longer if we re-wrote it today, even assuming that we intended the new constitution to make zero practical changes from the old, since there are a lot of "court rights", stuff that the Supreme Court drew out of the Constitution that isn't explicitly written in there. Modern governments are more involved than 18th century governments, and would thus need to spell out more stuff

Nope, that's neither juridically viable or desirable on modern constitutional theory. What we call synthetic constitutions trump analytic ones anytime.

You see, the most bulky and complex body of text written as a single body was the original French Civil Code, because it tried literally to rule over everything instead of setting general guidelines and principles. Needless to say, it failed spetacularly. Even for the so called Civil Law, as opposed to the Common law, the measure of court rulings have been steadily increasing.

Inside the juridical field there is a longtime standing tug-of-war between theorists, mainly university professors and other doctrinaires, and practicioners, that is, judges, lawyers and prosecutors. Theory versus practice. The first one prefers the laws to be neatly written down - which itself it includes already a measure of valuation, since no letter of law is going to be neutral - and the second one focus on jurisprudency and subjective adaptation of the letter of the law to the concrete case. The former one is inherently flawed because no letter of law is going to fill every concrete case. The letter of law becomes no longer a form, but a one-size-fits-all mold that inevitably is going to rule some cases unfairly, or discourse innefectively over State matters.

I could give you plenty of examples of excessive constitutionalism placing in check beneficial laws and judicial measures on countries like Brazil or India, or even inside the European Union. It was told the constitution would protect those countries - however, it's very interpretation still depends on whatever the dominant powers seem to be correct, or often preventing the country from swiftly taking decisions it would benefit the populace as a whole.

Most curiously, it would seem the US nowadays is one of the very few countries that is moving on the opposite direction of the power shift from the legislative to the judiciary that has been happening for a long time. It's possible that the large ammount of trust of some people place on their government and intellectual theorists - such as americans, canadians and swedes - may factor into it.

Personally I think it's a terrible idea. We have Argentina as neighbors to show just what happens when populism and statism take a grip on the rule of law.