re: #278 Nojay UK

You Yanks do have a mulligan option, the Constitutional Convention. It’s basically a “jack up the license plate and wheel a new car underneath” function the existing but seriously out-of-date Constitution allows for. It allows you to “delete all and replace” everything with a brand-new constitution suitable for a 20th century nation, or maybe late-19th century if you don’t want to rush things. Of course you might end up with “The Handmaid’s Tale” rather than “Utopia” (which, I might add is a vastly over-rated book — Thomas More was not as good a good writer as Margaret Atwood).

Here in the UK we don’t have a constitution as such, we just have a lot of vague ideas flying in close formation. It works for us and it allows us to ditch things which don’t work any more as times change and easily add stuff that we think we might need right now.

At this point, a constitutional convention would likely mean the end of the Union. I am not sure you could get the disparate parts of the country to all agree on a brand new constitution. Hell, the convention would probably break down if the subject of a declaration of rights were introduced and included anything like the right to privacy.