Yesterday’s discussion on the show about whether the Abraham Lincoln of 1860 could be elected today–or if an Abraham Lincoln with today’s social beliefs could be elected in 1860 with The Professors got me to thinking: Could the United States of America–if it did not exist until this moment–actually be founded as a nation?
While we like to think that July 4th of 1776 is when the US of A was “founded”, our true birthday as a nation is September 17th of 1787–when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the document that established how we were going to govern ourselves. Before that, we had been a very loose confederation of states and territories with few central rules on self-governance.
That convention was very contentious–as those who believed the states themselves should wield most of the power clashed with those that believed a powerful central government was necessary. In the end, both sides compromised on a number of issues to produce the unique mix of Federalism that has stood for 235 years.
But the idea of a Constitutional Convention being held today–and producing a workable document–is ludicrous. For starters, at least 10-million “groups” would demand to be represented in the process. And if that representation were to be denied, they would immediately claim that the process was “exclusionary and illegitimate”. And if we somehow found a way to include representation from every subset of society, giving each of them just 5-minutes of input would equal more than 5700 years worth of debate–on each issue.
Using our current Constitution as a template, Article 1 on the Congress would be gutted. It’s unlikely that we would now choose a bi-cameral legislature. There would be just one large House of Representatives, with representation strictly based on population. The Senate, with equal power for each of the 50-states, would be seen as “unfair”. Article 2 would be completely revamped as well–with a President beholden to the wishes of the Congress, and a bureaucracy of agencies that would be given free reign to develop rules and regulations that would hold the power of law–even if not approved by Congress. Article 3 would be interesting, as there would be fierce debate over whether or not to have a Supreme Court that could block the President or the Congress from doing whatever they want. If there is one, it would likely be a big one–with, again, all potential “groups” represented on it to ensure “fairness”.
Then there are the Amendments. We can pretty much toss out the First Amendment. There will be no unfettered freedom of expression (because words are violence), the Government will have say over what the press can report (because Fox News), not all religions will be allowed to practice all of their tenets (because Evangelicalism), and because fairness will be ensured by our new Constitution, why build in a right to protest?
Second Amendment? Yeah right. Third Amendment? Should we even have soldiers? Fourth Amendment? This might actually stay–but forget no-knock warrants, and if we think you might have a gun then forget that whole warrant thing altogether. Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments? We’ll keep trials–but scrub all of that Government seizure stuff. If we don’t think you should have something, we should just be able to take it.
The Eighth Amendment is out. Forget excessive bail–there will no longer be any bail.
Now things get really tricky. The Ninth Amendment is likely gone, as we will no longer just assume that we have individual rights the Government cannot infringe upon–and that the Government (in what will likely turn out to be a million-page document) will detail every “right” that it will give to you by it. Plus what rights you absolutely do not have will be spelled out in writing as well.
And then the Tenth Amendment is right out, because individual states (if they are even allowed to exist) will not have laws that differ from those of the Federal Government.
Other Amendments we can pretty much forget about, the 12th establishing the Electoral College for electing the President (provides too much balance of power to states), the 22nd so President Obama can come back again, and the 26th would likely be changed to go as low as 10-years old to vote because children are the future and they deserve to decide the future….or something.
What would follow is a million other amendments each spelling out incredibly specific “rights”–most of them requiring free distribution of limited resources, which would create the kind of economic chaos that would doom the country to immediate third world status.
It’s a scenario like this that I try to bring up to the short-sighted politicians that are pushing for a 2nd Constitutional Congress to cram in a bunch of junk they support right now. Our only hope is that everyone involved in drafting a new Constitution would become so frustrated with the fact that no one would agree on the language of the land acknowledgement to start the document after 10-years of debate, that they would all just go home and appreciate what we’ve already got.
