Time For A Constitution Rewrite?
Did President Obama defile the Constitution by halting some immigration prosecution, exempting some Obamacare mandates and granting waivers to No Child Left Behind?
Would a GOP president with a GOP Congress restore literal following of our founding document?
Arguing over this goes nowhere. What we need is a total Constitution rewrite.
Why? Because it was written before cellphones, driverless cars, drones, replacement body parts, trans-men and transwomen. It requires courts to make decisions about what was meant in 1787. Is gun ownership limited to the militia or guaranteed for everyone?
Some make liberal interpretations of the archaic language. Some take every word literally.
The former requires a kind of mental divining rod. The latter might require us to quit our paper dollars because Congress was only given power to “coin Money.”
The Constitution is out of date. We won’t attempt a new one because we’d never agree on anything more than the harmless preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union.
We’d get hung up right off the bat on why People, Order and Union are capitalized.
I suggest it begin it this way: Government shall be a mandate to get along with people you do not like.
I’m reminded, too, of the many amendments presented to Congress that went nowhere.
• Barely 100 years in, House members wanted to abolish the Senate because until 1913 senators were appointed, not elected.
• Rep. Lucius Miller, Democrat from Vermont, introduced an 1893 amendment to change our name to the United States of Earth; that we had dominion rights over the planet.
• That same year, when the Navy Secretary pushed for building one battleship and six torpedo boats, some House members offered an amendment to abolish the Navy and the Army.
• One year later, the hot amendment was to acknowledge that God and Jesus Christ are the supreme authorities in this country.
• In 1933, an amendment failed, which would have capped the legal wealth of Americans at $1 million.
The next year, Louisiana Gov. Huey Long unveiled his Share The Wealth program. It would have capped personal wealth at $50 million, about $600 million in today’s money.
Long said, “It is not necessary or reasonable to have wealth piled up beyond the point where we cannot prevent poverty among the masses.”
The last dead-on-arrival amendment was in 1971. It said every American has the inalienable right to an environment free of pollution. Pennsylvania had adopted that by a 4-1 vote. Congress — then with a
Democrat majority — wanted no part of it.
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