Is It Time for a New Constitutional Convention? – Governing

The 250th birthday of the United States is coming in four years. Already the great cultural institutions of America (National Endowment for the Humanities, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, prestigious universities) are thinking about the appropriate way to celebrate this important anniversary. We can expect fireworks, parades, festivals, orations and protests, criticism, demands for a full-on national recognition of all that has gone wrong in our history. Some will argue strenuously that celebrate is the wrong term; we must merely commemorate lest we be seen to endorse the errors and oppression of Americas past.To Celebrate or CommemorateTo tell the truth, Im already dreading America at 250. It is certain to become an intense flashpoint in the Culture Wars. The left will want to talk about racism, sexism, homophobia, environmental damage, dispossession of Native Americans, exploitation of workers and the hypocrisy of white men like Thomas Jefferson. The emphasis of the left will be on the unfinished business of America. The right will denounce any serious criticism of our national history as apologizing for America, America hating and Critical Race Theory. I so dont want this important holiday to be a shouting match about what America signifies. Beau Breslin holds the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair in Government Professor at Skidmore College, a private liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

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Sophisticated algorithms now available can produce a program for finding a truly representative delegation some ideal mix of gender, ethnicity, age, lifestyle, orientation, spiritual views, economic status, geographies and political affiliation. Anything less representative would lack credibility and legitimacy.

Congress would have to make all this possible by passing an enabling law that forced employers to grant their workers a four or five month leave of absence with full pay (moneys provided by Congress). This would be a burden to individuals, families and business, but every delegate would know that they were part of the renewal of the American republic.

The first two or three weeks would be a series of careful orientation sessions, led by historians, constitutional theorists, veterans of constitutional conventions in other countries, political scientists, demographers and geographers.

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Thomas Jefferson understood that governments do not reform themselves. They must be reformed. Thats why Jefferson recommended, in a famous letter to his principal compatriot James Madison, that we tear up the Constitution once ever 19 years and begin fresh. The earth belongs in usufruct to the living, not the dead, Jefferson said. Madison was, to put it lightly, skeptical.

A summary of how ABC News covered the 200th anniversary of America's independence. The question for us is whether to put the fireworks, picnics and bunting aside in favor of an overdue national conversation.

Here is a short list of things we need to think about, and perhaps reform.

The naysayers will find plenty of reasons to condemn this suggestion, and I doubt that we have the national will to take the risk. But in my view, the risk of trying to bandage our current system back together is greater than the risk of a thoughtful reboot. Who would try to make Windows 2.0 work decades after it proved to be too primitive and limited to perform the functions we expect from computer software? Jeffersons formulation of this concept came in a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

More than any of the other Founding Fathers, Jefferson understood that trying to govern a third of a billion people in the 21st century using an instrument that was fashioned in the 18th century, would be essentially impossible. The Founders lived in a three-mile-per-hour world. A high-tech weapon (an 1803 Harpers Ferry rifle) took 30 to 40 seconds to reload. Women were regarded as legal appendages of the primary males in their lives.

The Founders barely understood the circulation of the blood. Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, used two methods of treating the sick: bleeding and purging. Dr. Franklin managed to prove that electricity and lightning are related, but people still lighted their homes with candles and whale oil lamps. Most Americans were comfortable (enough) with slavery. Steam was just beginning to be used to power boats and mills, but the age of the railroad was still 40 years out, and the internal combustion engine was a century in the future.

It is true that our core political principles dont have the same temporary shelf life as VHS video, Pac-Man or the Hula-Hoop, but the world of today is profoundly different from the world of James Madison, in his wig and buckled shoes, that it is now different in kind as well as in degree. What would the Founders say about cloning, GPS surveillance, an MRI, cyber porn, the morning after pill, nuclear weapons, a Mars landing and cruise missiles?

The earth, said Jefferson, belongs to the living.

A new constitutional convention could only do us good. We need to find the confidence to undertake a formal national renewal, based on a gathering of a truly representative body of American citizens.

Originally posted here:

Is It Time for a New Constitutional Convention? - Governing