Why are we so willing to do that? The Founding Fathers, after all, were ourselves at their time in our history.
Make no mistake, the partisan battles we wage today on matters of political philosophy have been waged since our inception, since our birth as a nation. But the Constitution, at the time it was written, was the best consensus opinion of what our nation should stand for and how it should be governed. And that consensus was revolutionary in the history of world and governance, and those who crafted it worthy of their received reverence for conceiving of, writing and adopting a form of governance which trusted the people to govern themselves, but in such a way as to not infringe on the inalienable rights of the individual, and for even conceiving of the concept, under law, of inalienable, individual rights. The Founders deserve their due; but they were nothing more than us, then, politicians and public servants who were believers in government of, by and for the people, and seeking some consensus means to codify that and live under it.
And just to be clear on that point, things which were not part of the consensus were left unaddressed, kicked down the road, as it were, as we kick things down the road now, to a later time when hopefully a consensus would exist, slavery probably the best-known of those. And even on that point, you have to give our politicians and form of governance credit for attempting in various ways and on multiple occasions to find a consensus political solution to slavery short of war. They tried various compromises which kept the peace, but also kept slavery alive - the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, two of the better known.
Clearly, though, a government fails which can only solve its national problems and debates through civil war. None of the Founders were alive in 1861, when the Civil War started, but Jefferson was still alive in 1820 when the Compromise of the same year passed, defining a geographical dividing line between free and slave states, and clearly he saw it as an indication that the government he had helped define was failing when he said, "...this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper."
They were men, in 1787, who did their best to fashion a form of government which checked majority rule with individual liberty, which divided the right and power to make law between the federal government and the states, which fashioned an apolitical judiciary for adjudicating the rules as they had so defined them, and which divided federal powers in such checked-and-balanced manner as to militate against Lord Acton's observation that, where human beings are concerned, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Today, many people - many with a bully pulpit and many without - have a knee-jerk reaction to suggestions of amending the Constitution, or attempting to, to address many of our hottest and most fundamentally disputed issues, such as abortion, other privacy issues such as governmental eavesdropping, deficit spending, campaign financing, other election issues such as the Electoral College, the timing and spacing of primaries, and the entrenched but uncodified supremacy of the two-party system. All such issues and others would be fair game if we ever convened another Constitutional Convention, the last one having been convened 220 years ago, and, at the time, coming only 11 years after America first wrote the rules for her own governance. Basically, America waited a decade to review how things were working, and if they could be improved, and has waited 22 decades since for the next review, and is still waiting. And there was no war, threatened secession, or other national crisis hanging in the balance when the convention was convened in 1787, rather, only a list of national issues and a sense that the first attempt could be improved upon.
The Constitution is not just law, it's fundamental law. Whether a woman and in fact all of us have a fundamental individual right to decisions about our own bodies beyond the reach of government; whether removing the impact and specter of a "bought" Congress or President advances government of, by and for the people; whether the government can listen in or read speech reasonably assumed to be private; whether natural and entrenched political demographics within a state mean that the perpetual minority never gets to impact the choice for President due to the rule that all state electoral votes go to the candidate receiving the majority of votes; whether the same states - Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and so on - get to have preeminent influence on the choice of the next President by always coming first; whether a third-party candidate can ever be anything but spoiler given the same electoral rules which disenfranchise an entrenched minority within a state; whether the government may institute a tax to fund a program supported by the people, such as Social Security, then spend every excess dollar on whatever else it pleases; whether a government may deficit spend, and to what degree, and under what circumstances, and when may it not; these are all issues which many would see as fundamental and worthy of being addressed constitutionally, if we can shed this notion that the Constitution is better left alone, that the Founders were so much smarter than we are, so much better, nobler, wiser. There were us. And were they here today, I believe they would second that.
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