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I don't think that similar mindsets would be a goal. They lived in a world 250 years ago. They owned slaves. They basically owned their wives.
What you need are people who actually draw the right conclusions from the mistakes that have been made on those 250 years.
And in your opinion in gathering a group of the greatest minds of today who would you include to accomplish those goals?>
PhD level Historians
The interesting thing is they intended for the Constitution to be updated periodicity To keep up with the times.
What they couldn't have anticipated is the downward spiral in education.
None. I don't trust any politicians of this day and age to be honest and responsible enough to do it.
Most important thing is:
Votes should be out of ALL SEATS, not only those present.
Example: 101 seats in a legislature
51 Team A
50 Team B
Team B shouldn't be able to just assassinate 2 of Team A to win majority. Fuck that shit. An empty seat should be treated as if it were a "no" vote.
The current system is basically favoring the side that supports political violence. And this shit is the same around the world. Just block your opposition from entering the building and voila! You get a majority.
Seriously am I the only one in the world that see this bullshit! Why are politicians so dumb? I should run this planet goddammit.
You fucking know it would be vibe written by AI
There's plenty of extremely accomplished and well respected legal Scholars and constitutional Scholars and and such who are writing and operating right now. You don't hear about them much because they're not you know clickbait Worthy, but they're out there. There's no reason to think they are less capable than the founding fathers. We tend to mythologize the founding fathers to an absurd degree.
Drafting a new constitution is fairly unnecessary outside of deposing an aristocracy or a dictatorship. Plus, it only has any effect if everyone agrees on it so you will need literally everyone to have some input and agree or else you will have seperationists.
I would just add the following and call it good:
No cap on the house of Representatives.
Term limit on EVERY elected individual, cabinet appointee, and judge.
Senate seats proportional to population with the smallest state receiving 1, a state double its size receiving 2, etc.
The President is not immune to indictment and has no authority over the DOJ.
EDIT:
\5. Individual campaign funds are capped, organizations funds require signatures and count towards the individual totals, with enforcement of federal prison time on ALL involved in the case of going over. Proven illegal funding can invalidate election results and trigger a new election automatically.
\6. In the event of an absence a new election must be called immediately, and any attempt to delay the process can be met for prison time.
\7. Total Bodily Autonomy - doctors are still expected to adhere to strict antinegligience practices and conditions, can choose to decline patients, but if a patient is informed of risks for proven safe procedures then it is their choice to have whatever medical procedure or even cosmetic procedure performed on their body as they wish.
Number 3 structures the Senate (more or less) the same as the House. The whole point of the Senate is to give each state equal representation, while the House gives each person equal representation.
If you're going to restructure the Senate that way, may just as well get rid of it.
The senate was conceived at a time when the most populated states were filled with slaves and disenfranchised poors who couldn't vote. There's no reason to discard a longer-termed gerrymanderjng-immune chamber of Congress just because we want the 70 million Americans in California and Texas to not be subjects of the 1 million in Vermont and Wyoming.
Stacking the senate to reflect population is fine. Especially if we change the house to only care about voters
The reason they're gerrymander immune is that they only have two reps that aren't up for election at the same time. If you award seats proportionally Californa will have roughly a dozen seats in the Senate. What would be the schedule and process for electing them all? Why not just use that process for a single legislature?
I don't see any logic behind giving every state equal representation when each state is not equal in population, commerce, or even territory.
I think the need for both a senate and a house is important, and the distinction between the two would be that individual districts select the house appointments while the state as a whole decides the senators.
I think the additional chamber of the senate helps quality control over changes by the house, and makes it harder for harmful changes like those by the GOP to pass while incentivizing changes popular by the larger majority.
1 = In the original Constitution there was supposed to be one Congressperson for every 30,000 citizens. We're apx 300 million, which would work out to about 10,000 Congresspeople. I think we can agree this would be a tad unwieldy
2= Term limits would just mean the same fat cats have to get new stooges more often.
3=The whole point of Senators was to make sure that the smaller states got equal representation.
We don't need to set the number at 30,000. But, hypothetically, if we did, then we can count 150 Million votes in a couple of days, so I think we can reasonably count 10,000 in a couple of hours, although we're going to have to rework who gets time to speak before congress and for how long and also do something about the Filibuster.
If the current system shows us anything it is that the corruptness of an individual does not correlate to a short time in office. Term limits are important to prevent corrupt people from amassing power and influence over a long period of time, such as in the SCOTUS. Monied interests have been shown more likely to put weight behind reelecting people known to play ball than newcomers.
Conversely it means larger population states get less representation. Fuck the smaller states. The few should not rule over the many.
There are 168 hours in a week.
If we had 10,000 Congress people and each had five minutes to present an idea it would take about 35 days for everyone to introduce themselves.
There's a science fiction novel that tossed this idea out as a very minor plot point, but I do like it.
Change from voting by location to letting people pick their own districts.
Any group that can show it represents a group of sufficient size gets one Congress member.
People can choose to be 'gun owners,' 'mass transit users,' 'single mothers,' 'factory workers,' 'farmers,' 'polygamists,' or any other designation they choose.
You'd need to get 1,000 random Americans in a room for a year with supervised communication/visitations with their family. No chance for sponsorships, no being bought off, no one is a political figure.
I don't think the Constitution at all needs a rewrite. I think the ideals of the Framers are just as important and valid today as they were when they were put to paper. Our problems come not from inadequacies in the Constitution, but from our own inadequacy to follow its teachings.
As a one-time student of Con Law, I will respectfully disagree. It's clunky, vague, out of touch with the settlement patterns of the country in the last 230+ years, and willfully ignores that political parties and bad actors are a thing. I have come to resent the lionization of the document and its drafters. The basic outline of a democratic republic is laudable and has somehow more or less endured, but it is what it is: a good start from clever provincial lawyers whose ideals outstripped their personal practices and helped make it work better than many would have thought, but who were still absolutely dealing with the issues and expectations of elites in the 1780s.
For goodness sake, judicial review isn't even in there. John Marshall basically made it up. So much with the US Constitution depends on norms and assumptions, yet we worship it like a holy text (e.g. "our own inadequacy to follow its teachings"). This makes it a HUGE problem when some smarmy asshole decides norms don't matter and the Supreme Court has (rather hypocritically) decided that only the text matters. At a minimum, we need some serious "patch" amendments to lock down things that no one thought anybody would be a big enough asshole to test.
The thing is, for the past 50 years, it seems everyone has become afraid of touching it. There have been so many ammendments, the constitution is made to be changed, get on with it
In fairness, one of the issues is that there's an absurdly high bar to amend it, and the downright scientific polarization of our political parties in the last 50 years or so has meant that they're constantly fighting over the middle, meaning there is unlikely to be consensus without something deeply traumatic happening first. The ERA was our canary in the coalmine there, I think. Of course, this makes it even more absurd that SCOTUS has leaned hard into textualist analysis that is completely unsuited to running a complex modern nation-state with a creaky old constitution. We need to take a page or two from papa UK and enshrine certain norms and principals as constitutional matters without obsessing over fucking commas like we do now. The irony of course is that doing so would take a constitutional amendment.
I got a feeling that something akin to the Great Depression is coming soon, and that there will be a repeat of the late 20s early 30s… could a new Roosevelt even appear again today?
Not a chance. The right is too comfortable telling blatant lies, and the public is too eager to believe their lies for that to happen.
The Constitution isn't a holy text with "teachings".
Even the guys who wrote thought it had a lot of problems, and didn't think it would last 50 years.
It realy should be completely be re-written. With an expiration date built in, to ensure it gets re-written in the future.
But didn't one of them say we need a revolution ever 10 or 20 years?
That was Jefferson—he wrote the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.
Snap elections. If someone fucks up, vote em out. No more of this "oh no I guess we have to wait 4-5 years before we can do anything" bullshit.