Constitution 2.0: Part I

I consider myself a patriotic and civically-engaged United States citizen.  I also have absolutely no reverence for the Constitution.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the United States Constitution is one of the most brilliant documents produced by Western Civilization.  It set up a system of government that has spawned a vibrant, prosperous society which has been emulated throughout the world.  New states continue to model their governmental systems after principles first implemented by the Constitution.

But brilliant does not mean venerable.  Winston Churchill once quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  The United States Constitution is not only no exception to this fact:  It’s the principal example.

If any Constitutionally reverent folks happen to be reading this, I imagine you must be thinking “What problems with the Constitution?  It’s the best form of government ever.  And even if you find something to quibble about, that’s only useful if you actually have some better ideas.”

Well, if I may be so bold, I do have some better ideas.  Over the next few posts, I will be outlining some problematic elements of the Constitution, and offering alternative solutions.  While none of these solutions are groundbreaking, some of them are radical.  None of them are realistic, but all of them are compelling.

1.     Centralize the government.

The United States decided to write the Constitution because the previous governmental system, the Articles of Confederation, was a bust.  The Articles failed because, in an effort to maintain the sovereignty of individual states, it required near-consensus from all states to implement any government action.  Consensus rarely happened, so little was accomplished.

Eventually, the states held the Constitutional Convention to come up with a more practical alternative.  The end result was a system with a much more robust national government that operated on majority rather than consensus.  Individual states were still hesitant to relinquish their individual sovereignty, however, so the Constitution drew specific limitations on what the national government could do, and left the remaining powers to the states.

So what exactly was the government of the United States?  Did the sovereignty of the nation lie in the federal government, or was it divided between the states?  Political thinkers in America argued over this from the get-go and the conflict came to a head in the Civil War.  The Union’s victory finally settled the question:  The national government’s authority was independent of states’ concession.

The victory of the Union, however, didn’t mean that America was going to abolish all state governments.  After all, the Constitution was specifically designed to unite a group of distinct states politically, without totally eliminating their sovereignty.  State governments are central to its operation.  With or without true sovereignty, state governments were here to stay.

Instead, the states developed a new relationship with the national government.  Each level of government maintained control over certain policy areas.  If the national government wanted to effect policy in the states’ domain, it would offer sates quid-pro-quo grant money to create specific programs, or use political influence to shepherd local officials toward implementing such programs.  This process, called “cooperative federalism” or “new federalism,” dominates political interactions between state and national governments today.

Federalism is maddeningly inefficient.  For the national government to get anything done outside of its constitutionally narrow sphere, it must bribe and finagle state government.  States, in return, spend their resources attempting to influence national policy by gaming the electoral process.  The court system is constantly clogged with legal turf wars between federal and state government.  All this bribing, finagling, gaming, and litigation uses government time and tax dollars, which could have been spent directly on policy itself.  It wastes public resources, and prolongs societal problems.

Venerators of the Constitution frequently cite its system of checks and balances as a virtue.  They would probably claim that the framers engineered this apparent inefficiency to reign-in runaway government.  The venerators are half right.  The framers did design the political give-and-take intentionally, but the system they created is not sound governance.  Since the Union’s victory voided the purpose of state sovereignty, the only thing states contribute to governance is 50 layers of bureaucracy.  As a result, we are now governed by a system that creates more gridlock than balance.

State sovereignty failed under the Articles of Confederation, it lost the Civil War, and its remnants are suffocating our government now.  It’s time to revise the Constitution to allow us to abolish state political institutions, centralize the government, and finally do what needs to be done.