About the US constitution: Why don't Democrats, in response to insane Tea Bagger constitutional originalists, say:
Hey, you know what? The constitution was a great founding document. But the world was different then. For one thing, the entire population of the United States was less than half the population of Phoenix, Arizona. In 1776, assuming you could travel 120 miles in a day (which would require you to switch your team of horses 4 times), it would take more than ten days to go from one end of the original 13 colonies to the other. Today a single person can drive that distance in one day. The postal service depended on slaves to carry mail from one plantation to the next. Really? Yes, really (a hogshead of tobacco was the penalty for failure to deliver mail to the next plantation).
More on the US Constitution below the fold.
The Founding Fathers are not the Contractor Parents, they're the Founding Fathers...no moms allowed, in colonial America, children are the property of the dad, of course
During the colonial period and the early Republic, children were viewed as economic assets whose labor was valuable to their parents and other adults. In this early era, the father as the head of the household had the complete right to the custody and control of his children both during the marriage and in the rare event of divorce. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the child's value as a laborer decreased and more emphasis was place on child nurture and education.
A foundation is not where you go to live, it's what you build on. The Constitution was an amazing document for its day, but that day is past. And the rapid Tea Partiers just shouldn't be allowed to say "We wanna go back to the Constitution [except for the ridiculous parts]" and get away with it. I mean, hello? Slavery, indentured servitude, women not allowed to own property, almost everyone living in tiny, tiny settlements of populations where you could go from birth to death without traveling more than 20 miles (talk about the relevancy of the Interstate Commerce Clause -- it's not some boondoggle, it actually makes sense that so much Federal law is based upon that). Our world has changed. Technology, first the telephone and the automobile, then radio, television, and now the internet, in the future video communication, has stitched what had been a loosely affiliated group of communities containing a tiny population together in a way that has grown far too large and complicated, and whose problems are so far removed from the problems of Colonial America, for a document written 250 years ago to regulate, much less describe. The Constitution is the foundation for the house we now live in, not the house itself.