Designing America: #3: What Changed From 1776 to 2006?

What would have happened in the year 2000 if the framers of The Constitution had included a sunset clause that cancelled their version in that year, a year more than two centuries in their future? I suppose we would have had to call a second constitutional convention in 1999 to draft a new version. Had the founders decided to limit the life of their work, we might have been prepared and might not have been so alarmed at the prospect of changing and, hopefully, improving our basic design of government. Even with advance warning and preparation, it would not have been a quick or easy task. I wonder, if they had set a sunset date for revision, what specific procedures they would have suggested we use in going about a second constructional convention.

Why would any right thinking American want to change a word in our basic government design? Would a second constitutional convention disintegrate into riots and revolution as warring interests pulled and tugged at possible changes? Or, might goodwill and compromise lead to a better, and more modern, design? One thing seems clear: the farther we go into the future the more antiquated and out of touch The Constitution becomes.

Instead of a sunset clause, what the founders left us with as a way of improving their work was a complex and cumbersome amendment process. For example: It would seem logical and, to some, necessary to grant full and equal rights to women once they finally secured the right to vote, but an Equal Rights Amendment was first drafted some eighty years ago and it is still waiting for enough states to ratify it to make it part of our government design.

One of the chief arguments against adding an Equal Rights Amendment is the belief that these rights are already inherent in the Constitution as written. This same argument was raised against the inclusion of the original Bill Of Rights; those first ten amendments were added to The Constitution during its ratification in the late 1700s. Some of the states, still smarting from the arbitrary and tyrannical rule of the British, refused to accept anything less than specific, written guarantees of individual rights. Everything depended on getting The Constitution accepted by enough states to put the new government into place. Not to have a unified government might have caused more years of chaos and raised the possibilities of a divided nation and even civil war.

Why did the founders accept amendments instead of re-writing the body of The Constitution? They had spend four long, hot summer months arguing over the draft they finally signed and sent on to the states, and they were wise enough to avoid another revision. In any case, they had already committed to an amendment process in Article V of the Constitution.

If the authors of The Constitution had, by some magic means, clearly seen and understood our society of today, would that have made a difference in their writing? It’s a very different world today that the one they knew. Then the country consisted then of a few million people living along the Atlantic coast.

Today, we have instant communication around the world with the Internet. They had only pen and paper, and a very slow delivery system when it existed at all.

They had to worry about hostile Native Americans furious over the steady invasion of their homeland. We have terrorists from abroad.

We can travel thousands of miles in just hours. The members of the first constitution convention often had to ride a horse for days to attend the meeting, and then they were away from home for months at a time.

Most people lived on farms. Illiteracy was common. Illegal immigration was not a problem. People kept slaves. Women did not have the rights they have today. In 1780, entertainment consisted of singing, recitations and dancing. There was no electricity and, of course, no television, refrigeration or electric motors to do the work. Life expectancy was short, but now we live long into old age and have very different medical and financial problems. There was no retirement system, no mega corporations, no War On Drugs, and no genetic engineering, space flight, federal banking system, industrial pollution, or global warming. Today, of course, we have a much more diverse population. It was a totally different world, and yet we still live under the government designed for the long vanished world of Ben Franklin and George Washington.

The legal problems all these changes have produced are nearly endless. One example is abortion, a procedure that was rare two centuries ago and horribly risky when attempted.

Amazingly, we’ve made it all work over the years. If we go about it in the right way, we could gradually update The Constitution itself - reserving in historical glory the original version that got us started while recasting it in light of today’s conditions.

Our world today presents many legal, financial and social problems that could never have been foreseen in the late 1700s. And so none of these problems are covered in The Constitution except in the most general sense. It falls to the Congress and the federal judicial system to settle disputes that arise from this quagmire, and the individual voter has little say about any of it.

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Bill says on 2006-03-27 07:21:44 about Constitution Most of the subjects mentioned in the article are not in the Constitution. The premise of it is wrong. If not in the Constituiton, the government has no business in it. Most of our problems stem from the fact that we have moved away from the principles of the Founders. As these issues have arisen those wishing to control us have found a way to worm their way in to control. Hence the last sentence, the sovereign citizen has little to say about it: the Founders intended he should have everything to say about it.

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