America's Constitution is Broken: Here's How We Fix It

The American Constitution; by extension the structure of our government and much of our economic and social policy, is broken and deeply flawed. The grand experiment that is the United States of America has never been perfect, it has always been imperfect to one degree or another, and it will likely always have its flaws. That said, America's story is one of constantly trying to be better, to become more free and inclusive, of being more fair and just, of acknowledging the faults in our past and striving to correct them in our future. America is a beautiful mess, and we find ourselves at another inflection point in the history of our nation, one which will determine the direction we travel in for the next several generations to come.

Since 1789, when the Constitution of the US took effect, it's been amended twenty-seven times. At the time of its ratification, the now nearly-sacred document denied women, ethnic minorities and even a large swath of adult white males the ability to vote, depriving them of a voice in the functioning of our government. Abject chattel slavery was not only legal but protected through great political compromises, such as the structure of the Senate, intended to give Southern states enough political power to ensure the practice of owning other human beings would not be torn from them for as long as possible. Native Americans were denied any sort of cohesive protections and were instead forcibly relocated, regularly killed and often relegated to exist within desert and mountainside reservations unsuitable for the sustaining of large populations. Many states went on to mandate only professed Christians, and often only those of the Protestant variety, may hold state and local-level political offices. And so, from the very beginning of our country's history a de facto patriarchal, slave-owning, white Protestant Christian society sat in place of the free, multi-cultural, religiously tolerant, near-mythical United States professed to exist within our Constitution.

Fast forward more than two-hundred and thirty years, and America has done much to bridge the gap between the harsh reality of its founding and the idealized values within our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. While far from perfect, the United States has become more free, equal, democratic and tolerant than at any other point in its history. The American experiment has been so successful that most nations on the planet either actively are or claim to be democratic republics. Constitutional monarchies and authoritarian republics make up the majority of those remaining. The US now spans across North America and beyond, hosts the largest economy on the planet and operates the best-funded and likely most powerful military in the history of our species. America is a far different place than our founders left it, and in nearly all cases the country is better for it.

Nonetheless, there remains glaring and serious flaws in the structure of the United States, and it is past time we endeavor to update our Constitution to reflect the needs and reality of the current day. The federal Senate blocks the vast majority of attempted reform bills, even if the American people support the given measure by large margins. Public desire for codified abortion rights, marijuana legalization and universal healthcare are among the more high-profile examples. The filibuster along with campaign finance corruption and a lack of term limits has created an entrenched base of power within the Senate on both sides of the party aisle dedicated to preventing as much reform as possible, regardless of popularity with the People or benefits provided to American citizens. While the structure of the House of Representatives is less mangled and corrupt than the Senate, it is nonetheless beholden to one of the more grotesque political practices still in place: gerrymandering. In more than a dozen states throughout the nation, state-level political power allows state legislators to draw congressional districts as they please, effectively choosing their voters while denying their constituent's right to a fair and free election.

The judicial system has become of a game of political football, blessed with far more power than they were ever intended to, allowing life-long appointed members of the Supreme Court to make ruling impacting tens of millions of Americans from the protected comfort of a seat which they are entitled to until they voluntarily retire or otherwise become unable to fulfill their duties. The Supreme Court of the United States holds a majority of judges appointed by Presidents who did not win the popular vote in their presidential elections, creating an undemocratic pocket of corrupt political power via another undemocratic technicality, both of which create true and lasting consequences for the United States. Combined with a perceived mandate to interpret the Constitution as the Founders would have intended, deeming themselves 'originalists', the current Supreme Court is displaying its profound corruption through one regressive ruling after another.

Next, we have the executive branch of the federal government, led by the ever-discussed office of the Presidency. After also collecting far more public focus and power than initially intended, the President has become a king-maker, packing federal courts and controlling how and when federal regulations and laws are applied with a rather astounding lack of accountability. The only position in the nation wherein every citizen can have a vote and a say in who gains the office, the electoral college and its focus on winner-takes-all point values assigned to states has undermined the democratic process and resulted in only a handful of states truly being influential in any given election. The last two Republican presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both failed to gain the highest number of votes among the American people, yet nonetheless won their elections due to an ineffective and outdated system instituted as a can-kicking compromise more than two hundred years ago.

Despite the problems detailed above, it doesn't cover the still-poor treatment of Native Americans, the lack of enforcement of racial equality and fair-employment practices, the lack of public protections the likes of mandatory parental and sick leave or guaranteed access to healthcare for all citizens and many other ills of our nation's history which have never been properly addressed. Our middle class is declining, labor protections are among the worst and least-sophisticated in the developed world, everything from educational quality to infrastructure maintenance to maternal death rates leave America increasingly behind its national peers, and all based on a constitutional system which was designed to stop change far more easily than implementing the People's will. The United States was not founded on democratic principles as we often tell ourselves, we made it more responsive to the concerns and values of American citizens over time. What our nation was actually founded on was the idea that neither monarchs nor the 'mob' (i.e. the average citizens) should have free reign over the nation, and an educated, land-holding, white male elite should control the United States in perpetuity. Our Constitution and the governmental system it spawned was created by rich white men for rich white men, and its time we stop relying on this document as a source of democratic, progressive inspiration and instead take up our forebear's fight to bring democracy and equality to the United States despite its founding intentions.

Now, how might we go about this change? There are dozens if not hundreds of minor changes which would improve things: term limits for justices and elected legislators, banning partisan gerrymandering, expanding the House and the Senate membership, ending unlimited corporate donations to political campaigns, mandating all elected representatives place their assets into blind trusts while in office, eliminating the electoral college and ending the Senate's filibuster. Yet, as helpful as these reforms would be when taken together, implementing any one of them is an incredibly difficult task in our current system, and may well require a harder reset of American politics. This publication would submit a superior option would be to work towards the founding of a Second American Republic with a new Constitution, one which includes the personal protections guaranteed by the first yet overhauls the structure of government and provides far more widespread protections for American citizens. An Economic Bill of Rights, guaranteeing healthcare, labor representation, automatic voter registration and more would all help constitute a truly democratic foundation for this new and improved America.

The Senate should be dissolved, resulting in their current powers and responsibilities being integrated into a much-expanded House of Representatives whose members would serve a term-limited four-years at a time. A representative should be guaranteed for every 500,000 citizens through districts created along non-partisan lines by third-party commissions. Census data should be collected via largely electronic means every 5 years instead of 10. The Supreme Court should have a member cycled out every two years, resulting in an 18-year term limit, with another member automatically added from the appellate court system via a predetermined, numbered process outside of the immediate control of politicians. The presidency should be dissolved, with the office's power diluted and spread to the various consolidated department heads which are appointed by the legislature. Democratic referendums should become baked into the new constitutional system, though with the caveat that specific verbiage, enforcement and other details be free of corporate influence and largely determined by the legislature. While all of these ideas may seem somewhat radical to modern Americans, they are based on superior political systems from nations around the world, and would grant the United States a political flexibility and democratic guarantee it currently sorely lacks.

America is an amazing country, a historical anomaly of freedom and prosperity in a world which has too often been held back by petty despots and short-sighted oligarchs. Despite the unique and impressive place the United States holds in world history, we are the oldest continuously-existing democratic republic currently in existence, and it's increasingly showing. The current Constitution does have the ability to be amended, yet the difficulty in doing so alongside the built-in stopgaps which encourage broad consensus of the political class to implement changes has and will always lead to eras in American history wherein we fall behind in our mandate to protect, support and represent our citizenry. It's time we accepted this fact and instead seek to re-found ourselves upon truly democratic principles we so cherish in the modern US. America can live up to its potential and promise, we simply need the foresight and courage to make it reality.

References:

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Constitution

2) https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution/how-did-it-happen#:~:text=Writing%20the%20Constitution,in%20less%20than%20four%20days.

3) https://www.history.com/topics/united-states-constitution/constitution

4) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/progressives-constitution-oligarchy-fishkin-forbath/621614/

5) https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-constitution-is-inherently-progressive/

6) https://www.acslaw.org/expertforum/a-progressive-vision-of-the-constitution/

7) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/opinion/liberals-constitution.html