re: #131 William Lewis

The Constitution is not intended to be a suicide pact …

An interesting statement.

I’ve written before that I think the Constitution is out of date. It’s an 18th century effort which was designed with that problem you’ve pointed out.

The framers had to deal with the problem that the newly declared nation-state of the US might indeed commit suicide if they couldn’t get all the participants to agree.

It turns out that some of the new states’ representatives to the constitutional writing process were a bit AWOL. There was less involvement by the consensus than what we might presume now.

Even in the late 1780s the problem was the differences among the new states, and that not all citizens of the new country indeed thought the same thing about their new country.

The sort of forced knitting together of one legal document which would bind the states results in some gross compromises, from which we’re still suffering today.