Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

I'm not particularly well-educated. I'm not a lord of the debate. I'm not politically minded.

I'm pretty average.

But this average guy had a thought.

I'll keep it short and sweet. You guys can do the talking.

Does the Constitution need to be rewritten completely? Despite many amendments to it, it is still an antique from a different age that a modern society is basing itself on. Is this healthy for the United States? What do you think about it?

Who would get to decide what the "new" Constitution would entail?
It is the fact that the document we currently have puts the fundamental nature of how our government is run out of meddling modern-day hands (unless there's a whole lot of agreement on a change that needs to be made) that makes it so very necessary.

Nah I think it's fine. If something needs to be changed they usually change it, a rewrite sounds kind of unnecessary to me. Old yes it is but that doesn't necessarily mean outdated or bad. The Founding Fathers wrote it with the purpose of the document lasting for as long as the US does and for it to be flexible and changeable without completely starting over all the time. They did that because most of them feared mob rule and felt the public was too stupid to rule itself completely and that politicians would corrupt easily so they made this document to be one of the only things in the country that lasts and holds it together like glue. Don't underestimate the intelligent of the Founding Fathers these were some of the smartest men of their time assembling in one group to make a country which is pretty badass if I do say so myself. They were very very smart and you can see it as the Constitution still works 300 something years after with not much completely changed (but plenty added on of course). So yeah outside of the changes that happen with like the voting system making elections more direct and correcting injustices like slavery and such as it has been I don't see why it has to change. Even if for some reason it did it would be hard as hell to undergo such a process. Civil war would probably break out sooner than it being rewritten.

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof…

Nope. It has the built-in ability to be altered as society progresses. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and if it is broke, get 3/4th of the states to approve an amendment.

The UK doesn't even have one and they've been doing just fine for the last 1,000 years.

0.9999…=1 said:

Who would get to decide what the “new” Constitution would entail?

Presumably, delegates from the states that have either been voted in via election or by the state legislator. It would no doubt become a huge never ending political clusterfuck that would probably take several SCOTUS rulings to fail to clear up since the Constitution has nothing in it about completely redoing it.

Why would you want to rewrite the constitution at this time? I mean there's already something in place, like 0.9999 said. Anyways the Constitution already has its own modkit, it's called the amendment process, so we can modify the Constitution if truly need be; we can even modify previous amendments.

I guess another way to put it is this. I'm a programmer. While I've been pretty unmotivated lately, in my spare time I've been making a game. I've made tons of modifications to this game and it's over 30,000~ lines of actual code. When I first started working on it, I made some horrible design choices. These choices I had to deal with through the whole time working on it, if I didn't have time to fix them. The game still worked but when you're a year into your project it's very time consuming to change all of that. And that's the thing, it's time consuming to actually make that all work again. I could even start it over, like you're suggesting with the Constitution, but it will be extremely time consuming and during that period we're going to get delays and issues and it won't even reflect the modern times anymore. It's going to be so held back that my program is outdated, and thus inefficient. For a game, that's pretty horrible; for a country it's a national catastrophe – at a national level if there is a "bug" in the "System" it could completely crumble the government structure and lead to things such as anarchy or dictatorships.

This is why we stick to an amendment structure, because it is a really bad idea to suddenly shift and restart.

tl;dr if you do this you will make Constitution nukem forever