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Hello, person adopting the names of the three most admirable qualities anyone can exercise...

I vote for keeping the old (current) one, too, since I am inherently conservative...

However, we may not get that choice! I am looking two moves ahead in this chess game...my point being: The current debt/fiscal situation may implode the government, requiring a new one to be figured out.

This isn’t a trivial matter! No less than the Great One, Mark Levin, has stated that he thinks we live in a “post-constitutional” republic. That means we are living in a time when the law is uncertain...rights are uncertain...settled law is unsettled. If we are to live in a nation of laws and not of men, we need to figure this out, or we will implode fiscally, and legally.
This pipe dream constitution is one way. I also propose amendments to the constitution as another way. Neither is perfect, but both law out ideas for you to chew on.

Your Loyal Servant,
JKP

Thank you; it was lovely hearing from you. I think it takes an effort such as this to appreciate just how daunting a task writing the Constitution really was, for it does have to be both a plan on government and a strict set of limitations on government power. I am coming around to the point of view of the anti-Federalists that an attached Bill of Rights was likely to be less persuasive than actually incorporating those principles into the main body of the document. It does provide an easier target for those intent on circumventing them.

An exhaustive listing of corresponding features is beyond the scope of a forum posting, but it seems clear to me that certain ones have proven advantageous well beyond their theoretical predictions. Edmund Burke would probably chuckle to read that. A bicameral legislature, for one, that serves both to present a form of power sharing between equal state governments and unequal populations. This has, sadly, been seriously weakened by the progressive enthusiasms that gave us the 17th Amendment. Separation of powers for another, for which we have to thank Sydney and Montesquieu. Checks and balances. The list is long.

I shouldn’t have been too hard on your inclusion of such items as plastic surgery and intoxicating substances in view of the facts that (1) I do think limitations on government power belong in the body, and (2) the Framers decided to include a couple of specifics there themselves – bills of attainder, for one, importation of slaves for another.

The real difficulty with Constitutional language is not in the enumerated powers but in those the federal government has assumed under the general rubrics of the Necessary and Proper clause and the Commerce clause. This, for Constitutional conservatives, has proceeded from the suspicious to the abusive and now resides in the category of the grotesque. We now see serious debates in Congress on matters such as vehicle fuel from corn squeezings and weddings for individuals fond of alternate sexual practices. It is, to say the least, a degradation of an institution meant for loftier purposes.

I’ve bookmarked the thread to see what others have to offer. Thanks for posting!