There once was a man who fell in love with and bought a two hundred year old house. It had some problems although it was attractive, historically important and certainly worth preserving. But, he wanted to be able to live in it, so he added new bathrooms, built an annex for a modern kitchen and some larger bedrooms.

Of course, he needed new plumbing, a furnace for central heating, more storage space and a garage. Rather than keep the old house as it was for historic reasons, the new owner made additions and modifications leaving the original house as no more than an appendage to his improvements. The historical interest and value were lost, hidden by the improvements. The grounds on which the house stood had room for a second home. Building a different home would have left the historic house as it was, but the owner ignored that.

Over time, we seem to be doing something like that with the United States Constitution. We cannot bring ourselves to leave the old historically important wording and build a more modern version on the same ground, a version that might be more comfortable to live in. In almost every other area of human endeavor we do not hesitate to build better mouse traps. Just compare, if you will, the ships of the Eighteenth Century with those of today. In which would you want to sail across the dangerous Atlantic Ocean if you decided not to fly? Would you choose to sail for three months on an old sailing ship with no modern conveniences, or would you prefer a much safer modern cruise ship that would cross the Atlantic in less than a week? We welcome new versions of airplanes, surgical tools, and computers with enthusiasm. But blind loyalty and fear of change hold us to our old Constitution. Perhaps we correctly fear that opening any part of The Constitution to change would trigger a bitter and unsolvable war between powerful special interests.

Aside from the cumbersome amendments process, The Constitution allows for a constitution convention, but specifies it would only be for the same purpose of amending, not for re-writing. Other ways of improving the wording might include what the founders succeeded in doing: hold a convention devoted to a total re-writing of the Constitution. When The Constitution’s framers first met they threw out the old Articles Of Confederation and started a whole new document. This, of course, would probably be unconstitutional today. Today, that approach, aside from its illegality, could be explosive and lead to a prolonged and uncertain outcome. A second and very different way could be gradualism or model-building, a re-thinking process in a series of small steps continuing over time. I will be suggesting a model-building approach later in this series, and I certainly do not favor a single convention for total revision because, in the very unlikely event that one was assembled, such a convention would probably end in disaster.

It is not for me to demand specific changes in wording; that is a job for the voters and their representatives. My hope would be to raise some questions and get discussions started, so let me highlight a few problem areas.