Based on the perhaps erroneous supposition that people don’t lose the ability to read on Sundays, Re:Generator will be running “Re:Generator Sunday Reader,” a weekly feature showcasing an article, essay or website best judged on its own merits, rather than being pulverized by the filter of our oftentimes brutal snark. The first such piece is a discussion Larry J. Sabato is having on Daily Kos about his call for a potentially invigorating second Constitutional Convention – an action both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encouraged and in which mechanisms already in place would prevent major reform from being hijacked by theocratic factions of the Republican Party…
Throughout the history of the American republic, politicians have run on platforms of change: changing healthcare, or the economy, or foreign policy. They have promised their constituents that they will go and “clean up” Washington, and encouraged voters to “throw the bums out.” But nowhere amidst their posturing has there been a call for changing the system itself; no one seems to see that maybe it’s the Constitution, not just the Congress, that needs to be cleaned up.
In the 220 years since the Constitution was written, the United States has undergone a great transformation. The 13 original states on the Atlantic seaboard have grown into 50, from sea to shining sea. Advances in transportation and communications have created an interconnected nation that shares information in the blink of an eye. We’ve seen the growth of political parties, and the various institutions and practices that come with them.
But what we haven’t seen is major Constitutional reform. There have only been 17 amendments (the first 10 must be considered a part of the original document), one of which simply reversed another, others of which have been quite minor. Despite the new realities of the modern United States, our government runs under the direction of a document written with quill pens. This is not what our founders envisioned. Thomas Jefferson insisted that, “No society can make a perpetual Constitution…The earth belongs always to the living generation.” He wanted major Constitutional reform every generation. One of Jefferson’s great contemporaries, James Madison, agreed on the matter, saying that constitutional revisions would be “a salutary curb on the living generation from imposing unjust or unnecessary burdens on their successors.”
Read more of “Making A More Perfect Constitution” by Larry J. Sabato
