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culture politics

Massive Do-Over

I have been thinking and reading about political issues like congressional seats for Utah and Washington DC, where America currently stands on abortion, and the complexity and complaints about unfairness in our tax system. I’d love to write a post about almost all of these topics, but then I got to thinking – what if we just started over.

Pretend that we put a freeze on federal law and started a constitutional convention to rewrite our government from the ground up. We would rewrite the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. All federal agencies would be scrapped although the military and others employed by the current agencies could probably expect that many of them would have similar opportunities under the new system. We would appoint a fresh slate of leaders – no consideration of when their terms would have ended under the current system because we might not even have the same positions available in the new system.

Now I’m not saying that we should do this, I’m asking what might happen if we did.

My own suspicion is that we would keep the structure of a bicameral legislative branch as well as an executive branch and a judicial branch. Beyond that, what would be said of issues like abortion or who has what kind of representation? What new balance of power would emerge between federal and state governments? At least two Constitutional amendments would disappear (because they cancel each other out) but would more go? What social issues might show up as new amendments?

Help me out here – what do you think this would produce? Does it differ from what you think it should produce?

By David

David is the father of 8 children. When he's not busy with that full time occupation he works as a technology professional. He enjoys discussing big issues with informed people, cooking, gardening, vexillology (flag design), and tinkering.