Sunday, January 28, 2007

A New Constitutional Convention

A few weeks ago, I found myself proposing to Dr. Slammy that the United States was badly overdue for a major overhaul of our Constitution.  There have been and continue to be major philosophical and cultural debates among the various political poles in the country, and many of these debates could be wrapped up and addressed simultaneously.  In the process, We The People could take a long, hard look at what works, and what doesn’t, in the Constitution.  The method?  It’s spelled out in Article V of the Constitution - calling a national Constitutional convention to propose amendments to the Constitution.

In the past, the national convention option has been used by the states as a threat to force Congress to propose the amendments the states want.  The concern is that, in a Consitutional convention, any number of amendments can be offered on any number of topics and all of them would be voted on.  It would probably be chaos, and the outcome would unknown until the convention was complete.  But on the other hand, if a convention was done carefully, and it was thought out in advance, a Constitutional Convention could be the ideal tool by which to answer many of the pressing problems the country, and by which to force our Demenocrat and Repugnican politicos to clean up their collective acts.

In a national Constitutional convention, I’d like to propose that we address the following issues:

• Right to privacy: This one has been an issue ever since it was “discovered” in the Constitution during the Roe vs. Wade decision.  We need to codify this right into the Constitution or, if we don’t want to do that but still want to protect a woman’s right to choose, we should provide a different solution that makes the right to control one’s own body a fundamental right.
• Right to bear arms: The Second Amendment has been making people tear their hair out for 200 years now, specifically with the tension between whether the Second Amendment protects the individual’s right to bear arms, or whether it protects a state’s right to have a militia, or both, or something in between.  We need to clarify just what the right to bear arms really is and, just as importantly, what limitations, if any, should be permitted.  Should private individuals be allowed to own fully-automatic rifles?  How about RPGs or military explosives?  That line should be well delineated in the Constitution.
• Copyright: Copyright is a joke.  Congress continually extends the exclusivity period in order to protect copyright holders, but in the process, Congress makes it impossible for archives to make copyrighted material available.  And copyright, in the age of the Internet, file sharing, and encryption/decryption, needs to be better defined than it is in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 (the Copyright Clause).
• Governmental “taking” of property: In 2005, the Supreme Court allowed local government to condemn private property with the stated goal of turning over the property to a different private interest who can make the local government more tax revenue on the property.  This 5-4 decision is totally bullshit, and if we need to tweak the Constitution to get rid of this bad decision, so be it.
• Separation of church and state: Many religious conservatives rightly point out that the phrase “separation of church and state” appears nowhere in the Constitution.  Instead, the First Amendment prevents the federal government from establishing any religious litmus tests.  Church and state should be separated at all levels of government, and by updating the First Amendment, we could actually include language to that effect.
• Declarations of war: Congress is granted the authority to declare war, and they have the authority to rescind said declarations if they so choose.  However, imperial presidents have begun waging war without declarations of war.  This needs to stop.  No more open-ended “Congressional Resolutions” like the anti-terrorism resolution that enabled President Bush to invade Afghanistan that was then perverted to provide a legal justification for the invasion of Iraq.  For that matter, the entire issue of presidential power and the balance of power between the executive and legislatie branches should be revisited

There are certainly many other issues that need to be addressed that our forbears couldn’t have anticipated 220 years ago.  Not all of them should be addressed in the Constitution, but a Constitutional convention would enable us as a country to decide what should and should not be in our governing document.

[Crossposted to The 5th Estate]