Should There Be A New Constitution?

[AntiCentrist]

Originally Posted by Dumpy Dooby

I guess my point was over your head.

Oh, you're on the whole overthrow-the-government trip (since if "we the people" hold our own Constitutional Convention, the only way to enforce it is through armed revolt against the previous Constitutional regime). Nothing wrong with that, but let me know when you've established some progresss towards that goal.

By the way, if you're going to post remarks that have nothing to do with what a person is saying, you might want to post them as part of a separate, added reply, instead of needlessly quoting what someone else was saying on a different subject, so as to avoid confusion, and unnecessary allegations of things having gone over another's head (as if there was some friggin' reason I should have known what you meant when you typed your little off-topic irrelevancy).

[David Octavius]

Originally Posted by Diamond Cross

I do think it is worse today than in the past. For example, there is more negative campaigning and tit-for-tat actions (such as the Democrats trying to oust Gay republicans for their stance on homosexual marriage) than there ever has been before.

I'm sorry but how is that worse than when some high profile politicians openly debated to dissolution of the United States into smaller confederacies before the Constitutional convention?

The problem with generations of people is this, the present generations always think they live in the worse of times or the end of days, its been like that since the earliest history. How is today worse than when the black plague killed 40% of Europeans in the middle ages or in 1919 when influenza pandemic killed over 20 million? How is today worse than WWII when scores of Millions were killed and war waged around the globe? How is this worse when we went through a civil war?


We have to put things into context, it is not worse today than anytime in our history, it is bad yes and something should be done but history should show us that even when things were worse, we were able to do something as important as a constitution and make it work.

[David Octavius]

I know this thread is pretty much dead but I do want to say one more thing in regards to my argument of a new constitution.

Our ideologies and self interests aside, what should be clear is this, every action that is EFFECTIVE enough to reform a government that is in desperate need of rehabilitation, even something seemingly small, would fundamentally alter the foundations of our systems and how it interacts. If we must reform the system we ought to write a new constitution to ensure that whatever reforms we put in, the spirit of the present constitution is maintained and the changes are implemented seamlessly and with care.

The basic principals of the present constitution of protecting liberty, security and having a republic is genius and must remain the same, but as stated above, any significant reforms may alter the foundations of our system of how it is meant to work and perhaps not for the good. Any serious discussion about reform must take into account how it will affect the other parts of government because although our government was created from different parts (three branches of government) it is the connections that allow it to function smoothly as one machine to protect our basic principals. If we are ignorant of how our changes affect these connections, we may unknowingly jeopardize the principals despite keeping the same document.



For example, some may think term limits for Congress is a simple reform that would limit a lot of the corruption in this branch. However true this is, it requires amending the present constitution, which means that it will alter the original intention of the present constitution that was made specifically with no cap on term limits. If we limit the terms to 3 for instance, does that, in the House of Representatives, give us proper representation and stop corruption if members still have less than 2 years to know our needs and how it applies nationally to pass long term initiatives all while depending on special interests and lobbyists to raise funds to prepare for the next election that is always right around the corner? Such a change may actually make it WORSE by making the House nothing more than a continually revolving door with short terms and constraining limits, which does nothing to stop the dependency on special interests but instead give us even worse representation than we had before, making the cure worse than the disease.



Unfortunately, solutions that do not require constitutional change, such as campaign finance reforms, only treat the systems of the disease and not the root cause of it; such minor reforms have been used like band-aids for years to hide the deep wounds and have done nothing but prolong the inevitable corruption of power that we see today.


The problems we encounter today isn’t in the principals of our present constitution but the mechanisms it uses to PROTECT it against being violated by a government becoming too powerful or too ignorant of its people and it is because of this, the burden is on us to create one that does. In essence, reform really means having mechanisms that can effectively protect the very ideals that is in the present constitution.