Let’s Try To Catch Up

It's past time to bring our governing documents into the 21st Century

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the Constitution. Our glorious founding document, the one so much of the world has emulated, has become un-amendable, and its roots in the 18th Century are decaying.

The guiding document itself remains sound and deservedly praised as a blueprint for self-governance. Circumstances have changed so radically over the centuries that some amendments have to be adopted, and some of the existing ones need themselves to be amended.

For instance, do you think the Founders envisioned over 300 million people armed to the teeth, some—way too many—committing unthinkable acts of mass murder with weapons of war? The people, by a huge majority of 88%, want coordinated national background checks on gun sales. By a smaller but still significant majority, Gallup says 6 in 10 Americans want assault rifles taken off the market. A recent court decision in NY overturned a local ordinance that disallowed public carry without a permit. It has larger implications for the 25% of Americans who live in cities with similar laws. And that’s just the 2^nd Amendment!

There is little that hasn’t changed in 247 years.

The Senate, once lauded as the greatest deliberative body in the world is now constipated. The gridlock owes to things like the unspoken filibuster where one senator can veto a bill by sending a text message. No “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moments any more. Just whip out your smartphone and grind the institution to a halt.

No senior military appointments because one senator, Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach from Auburn is responsible. He’s the one who could not name the three branches of government—honest to Pete, it was like watching the old Jay Walking feature on the Tonight Show where man-in-the-street interviews revealed that people could not name their senators or congressional reps, but could recite all the McDonalds dipping sauces by heart. Tuberville, a grandstander of the first order is hamstringing the military he never served and pretends to love by holding up the appointments of 250 general officers until the Pentagon reverses its policy to provide transportation and out of states where women’s healthcare is compromised. For instance, if a woman (spouse or soldier) is deployed to Tuberville’s Alabama and has a miscarriage, she risks ever being able to conceive again—or even death by sepsis—because Alabama has made it impossible for a woman to get appropriate care there.

A similar Senate hold on Ambassadorial appointments—this one by Rand Paul—means our leaders have vastly reduced channels through which they can talk to other world leaders.

You’re always going to have idiots like “Coach,” but you don’t have to let them hurt military readiness. Should one junior senator really be able to stop all appointments to the general officer corps?

The original concept of the Senate was to ensure the slave states would agree to joining the Union by giving less populated states as much juice as the bigger ones.

Similarly, the Electoral College has outlived its usefulness. Also conceived as a way to keep slave states in the Union, the Electoral College was a hedge against the popular, majority-rules, vote.

These are institutions that must be modernized to reflect life in a world two-and-a-half centuries removed from the time in which they were written.

And talk about out of step, the Supreme Court must hue to the same ethical standards as all other courts in the land, but they won’t give up the above-their-paygrade opaque lifestyle travels and perks that are making news today.

Partisan gerrymandering is so completely anti-democratic as to be laughable—a system where representatives pick their voters instead of the other way around is in no way democratic, but the same court that decimated the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act, refuses to stop this blatant robbery.

The current alignment of these rules when combined with an “originalist” Supreme Court is a recipe for disaster. For the first time in our history, the Court is taking rights away.

Of course one should be careful what one wishes for. There’s a counter movement led by the hard-right. They’ve been clamoring for a new Constitutional Congress, but their goal is the opposite of mine. They’re interested in amending libel and defamation laws per their leader, Donald Trump. While they’re at it, they’d like to build anti-abortion measures into an amendment, and codify their “guns everywhere” approach to ensure no sane legislation restricting the flow of firearms is ever mounted. They would also like to undo the 14^th Amendment that guarantees citizenship to those born here, a particularly noxious attempt to breathe new life into Dred Scott, the shameful, and reversed SCOTUS decision that said everyone is not equal, allowing politicians to decide who is and who is not American.

They make this a risky venture, but a necessary one. We have to try to catch up.

©2023 Jon Sinton