Does anybody own their own business or have hiring authority at work? What would you do if you hired someone to do a job and, instead of doing what you told them to do, they did what they wanted to do. You would probably fire them, or at least, lose confidence that they would follow your orders in the future.
The United States is a representative democracy. We the people don’t get to decide issues; we only get to elect people who we hope will do what we want. We don’t even get to pick our supreme leader; we only get to elect people who then, hopefully, cast a ceremonial vote reflecting our wishes. Not everyone is equal, either. A voter from a small state has more influence in Presidential elections than a voter in a more populous state. Then, once the representatives are selected, they in turn hire people who we seldom know much about, or for that matter, even know of, yet these people do most of the work of government.
Many of us have contacted our representatives to ask them to impeach some of our more corrupt officials and were told they can’t. Polls show most of the country wants an end to the Iraq war, but our representatives fail to act. We want health care, stem-cell research, energy independence, a cleaner environment, better educational opportunities, living wages in a robust economy, restrictions on corporations and special interests, fair rather than free trade, and a system of taxation based on ability to pay, but we are told it can’t be done. Somehow, though, there was enough time for our representatives to debate gay unions and to rush to Terri Schievo’s bedside. And the political appointments were also busy spying on citizens, exposing the identity of a covert agent, torturing prisoners of war, mismanaging funds and issuing no-bid sweetheart contracts, and the list goes on and on.
The Constitution is a powerful document but is geared to a very different time. Many of our most pressing issues involve conditions that our founding fathers didn’t foresee, like the personification of corporations, or couldn’t have foreseen, like embryonic stem-cells. I believe it’s time to reexamine our country’s aspirations as embodied in the Constitution. Politicians will object, saying that there is too much opportunity for mischief.
I think the legacy of the Bush Administration will be an eventual recognition that the Constitution has to be made into a living document. The time for strict constructionism is long past. The Bush reign has shown how easy it is for our government to be perverted into a dictatorship and how difficult it is to fix once broken. This hasn’t been politics as usual. He has precipitated a Constitutional crisis. The Bush administration’s actions have followed a long-planned script aimed at quietly yet thoroughly overthrowing our democracy. The lofty concepts that the Constitution espouse, like the rights of individuals and the checks and balances of the three branches of the government, have been ruined, and now, must be repaired. Unfortunately, I think George Bush is right about one thing. It’ll be decades before even-handed historians will be able to make this appraisal. Only then will we be able to restore what our founding fathers had in mind two hundred years ago.
Given the chance, what notions would you add to the Constitution, change, or delete from it?