America will never solve its gun problem until it gets over its fetish for the Founding Fathers.

[nadinbrzezinski]

38. It has glaring problems to it

Congress is as dysfunctional as it is because of it (winner take all) Why John Stuart Mill came up with proportional representation. We need to at least move to Mill's system to elect representatives to Congress. It would require the unthinkable, an amendment.

The same dysfunction was seen before the civil war by the way, for similar reasons.

That is a more glaring problem than even the second and suppresses the vote. People who live in red or blue districts, that are far from competitive, simply stay home. Why bother? Gerrymandering also has it's roots in this document. Proportional representation would lead to the rise of multiple political parties, formally.

To say that we have a document that should be respected without question is actually part of the problem. It was within it that the seeds for the first civil war (not the first rebellion, or last by the way) were. It is where the seeds of what could be a second major civil war will be.

Of course, the country is a collection of regions, with dramatically different cultures as well as interpretations. This is far from just urban vs rural. If we sink into another open civil war, and if the country does not break up, it's high time to bring it up to the modern age. Jefferson would understand. He indeed wrote that it was not set in stone and it needed change every twenty years. Ironically that is almost once a generation.

There is also a reason why more modern constitutions do not enshrine how you elect people to office in the document. They look at us and shake heads.

A successor document will need something akin to the bill of rights. I think we can safely say the third article can safely be ignored by the way and removed. But things like the 2nd will also need to be either highly modified or removed in it's present form. Why? We no longer have slavery either. That is the true origin of it, and the Southern delegation insisted on it. They actually threatened to walk out. Yes, there is a plot for an alternate history of the US where the south and north start as two independent countries.

Whether the country survives as one nation or not will also determine the fate of the First and separation of Church and State. I can safely predict Christian successor states if the country breaks apart, as well as secular states. And I could go on. If we really respect those men, they were humble enough to understand it was a living document. We forgot that. We really have.

It is not a sacred text given to man by god, but a flawed document in desperate need of major changes.