Editor's Note 11/9/10

Story by Jacob Zlomke 

| Published Nov 9, 2010

The Constitution -- America’s holiest document. Talk about it, but don’t touch it. Appreciate it, but don’t change it. Know it, follow it, love it. And don’t forget about the Bill of Rights. Because 222 years ago, the founding fathers knew exactly what kind of society would exist today and knew exactly what to include and exclude in order for us to be the greatest country on the whole damn planet.

At least, that’s seemingly the case. But is it? In short, no. However, modern America inappropriately treats it that way. Yes, it was drafted by some of the smartest thinkers and politicians America has ever seen, but that doesn’t make them deified. They knew what they were doing, sort of. They knew well enough that we could get a half-decent government in place and have a set of ground rules on which to build. They were not, however, framing a government for the next two and a half centuries.

The Constitution is only 5,000 words long. That’s about as long as a Hemingway short story. How is one supposed to operate an entire country on something so succinct? One is not.

It has more pretty noticeable blemishes. The framers noticed this immediately and gave us the Bill of Rights, or 10 Things We Forgot to Include.

It seems that things pertinent in 1788 became archaic somewhere in the last couple hundred years. Things like slavery, which, if you haven’t noticed, has been rightfully abolished. The Constitution, which was written for exclusively white men, the only people given full rights at the time, does not address slavery, thus indirectly condoning it. Should we not have abolished it because the Constitution doesn’t explicitly say it’s wrong? Probably not. While getting rid of slavery is great, we somehow glossed over things like the Electoral College.

Once upon a time, the Electoral College probably served some purpose. But it mocks our democratic foundation when the leader of the country isn’t even selected directly by the people. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon both only received 43 percent of the popular vote. That’s not a majority at all. The second George Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but won the Electoral College, and here we are today. So when do we get to pick the president?

How about the fact that there is no reprimand for lawmakers that don’t abide by the Constitution? And what about term limits for members of Congress? Career politicians shouldn’t be the ones making our laws. People that want to initiate change within a set amount of time should be.

Amendments are hard to pass, but possible. There are 27 of them right now. It doesn’t destroy the foundation of the Constitution by adding more. There are serious flaws in our government that could be fixed if our leaders were willing to pass amendments but the Constitution has become a Holy Book not to be tampered with.

Why are we afraid to touch it, then? Why do we take it so seriously? It’s a document meant to be malleable, open to interpretation. The founding fathers weren’t so naive to believe that it would never need changed. Why else would they have left it so open to interpretation?