I believe that the time has come for the sovereign citizens of the United States of America to take an intense look at the structures of what history will remember as the greatest government in world history to date; that Republic our forefathers ordained for us and bequeathed to us. In the preamble to the 1789 constitution the founders put forward the purpose of the basic rule for our Republic, they spoke of “A more perfect union.” While our current constitution has allowed the United States of America to flourish beyond the wildest dreams of 18th Century humankind, I believe some critical adjustments need to be made to guarantee to our posterity an ongoing Republic that continues to strive to be more perfect.
There were many key features of life in the United States dating from colonial times that were such common experience and shared culture. The best of the mores and values of the time were not enshrined in a specific way into the founding law. It is beyond time to remedy that. Many features of life as it was and the values that formed the bedrock of our ordered liberty need today to be further amplified or enunciated in the document that forms the modern covenant that spells out the way We the People can agree to and by which we will govern ourselves.
As stipulated in the Declaration of Independence, governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. The political crossroads we find ourselves at is serious enough to warrant this keen and overdue look at our constitution and our Republic. I believe we’ll find that what we have, while not quite sufficient for today, should not be set aside at all. But we no longer face “Light and transient causes.” The issues we deal with today must be confronted, and we have to give our founding document the improving changes it needs in order to ensure it continues to work.
Our system of federal government has worked because of the checks and balances authored into it. But the federal government is becoming less tenable, less manageable, and worst, less accountable to the people whose rights it was designed to secure. As the government becomes less accountable to the people, it becomes less responsive to the checks and balances imposed upon it by federal principles; it becomes less responsive to the voice of the people. It could then become less of a government by, for, and of the people and more of a government that accrues power unto itself for its own ends; rather than a government meant to secure the blessings of liberty for the people it was meant to serve.
The 1789 constitution was, in the words of one author, a 5,000-year leap forward in human progress. Nothing quite like it had ever been conceived. And yet it contained within it a key flaw that in less than four-score-and-seven years would leave the country tending to some hundreds of thousands of wounded and dead, and dealing with the political scars of civil war.
While the major flaw was corrected by nothing less than a war, other less weighty issues were changed using the constitution’s amendment process stipulated in Article V. Amendments were a key part of the constitution from its inception, as the original required the “Bill of Rights” amendments to ensure its passage and acceptance. While many necessary changes to the constitution have been made, other necessary changes have become rare; and many changes, necessary and otherwise, have come to pass using methods and procedures that We the People did not grant to the federal government. It is becoming a critical matter that the government is beginning to fail to follow the law that We the People established for it.
In these latter days, due to the programmed difficulty in changing the way we allow the government to operate through the amendment process, and further due to the desire of those who would govern to will themselves power, the federal government has not been consistently content to stay within the bounds We the People established for it. Today we are faced with a de facto rise of an ostensible “Governing class” of quasi-professional politicians, tenured judges, and bureaucratically empowered civil servants. Unable to convince a requisite three-fourths of states’ legislatures or conventions to make structural modifications to the constitution, this new estate has taken upon itself to sidestep the boundaries set down by the wisdom of the ages; wisdom meant to form the more perfect union. This new estate is offering rulings and judgments without the political accountability our original social compact required from such decisions. It is time for We the People to hold this estate to account and return it to its proper position in a flatter federal hierarchy.
The belief that these changes have been or have not been necessary are a key dividing line for United States Americans. However, most Americans are pragmatic at heart. We can learn from our past, avoid the mistakes of intransigence that led to division, and work together to enshrine that which is noble and bound to ensure, for those who follow our current generations, to benefit from the blessings of liberty we will bequeath to them. If we make these improvements, we will change the world again, and again for the better. If we fail to make these needed changes, or if we revert to the older political ideas that either failed in their turn or failed to bring enlightenment, we will continue on a path that will ensure at best the squandering of our prosperity; and possibly something far worse.
Therefore, I have taken thought, and I am ready to propose some modifications that I believe will restore necessary ordered liberty while returning the Republic to a state that secures the rights of the individual sovereign people of these United States to life, liberty, and the means to peaceably pursue individual happiness.
As I publish the individual items, I will (attempt) to update links to them below.
Thank you for reading! I look forward to your comments.