It already is...that's why it is a "living document." Or, "deeply flawed." --
“African-Americans were not -- first of all they weren’t African-Americans -- the Africans at the time were not considered as part of the polity that was of concern to the Framers. I think that as Richard said it was a ‘nagging problem’ in the same way that these days we might think of environmental issues, or some other problem where you have to balance cost-benefits, as opposed to seeing it as a moral problem involving persons of moral worth.
“And in that sense, I think we can say that the Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day, and that the Framers had that same blind spot. I don’t think the two views are contradictory, to say that it was a remarkable political document that paved the way for where we are now, and to say that it also reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.” Barack Obama aka Barry Soetoro.
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If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in the society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. Barack Obama aka Barry Soetoro.
Regarding the first point, that the Framers did not consider black people, that is just bad history. They did. They were faced with the problem of getting this piece of paper approved. I am not a great history person, but they did do a pretty good job of paving the way for what they must have seen as a future battle on this issue. They omitted “property,” for one thing, although they certainly believed in property, since at that time slaves were “property.” They did not want to enshrine that institution. Many other facts and clues could be supplied by knowedgeable freepers, I’m sure. I am not making excuses for the Founders.
The second issue was carefully explained to me by freepers, in person, soon after I became active on FR. I can’t remember who these people were who instructed me on negative vs. positive rights, but I am grateful to them and to all the other people who took me in hand as a former “Democrat” (it was for practical reasons) who lived in a very blue area of a blue state. I think I even called the Constitution a living document at one point.
Meaning my ideas on the Constitution were all screwed up, as those of many others still are.
Hard to understand that our very existence as a Republic depends on that old piece of paper, but so it does.