The Constitution is ours, not the Founders'

It's long past time we confronted our blind fealty to the wishes and purported wisdom of the generation that birthed the U.S. Constitution.

The Founders did a remarkable job, to be sure. They gave us a document whose principles — most of them, anyway — have proven a sturdy and largely positive guide over a couple of hundred years' worth of sometimes turbulent history.

However, none of them would have wanted us, their literal and figurative descendants, to straitjacket ourselves to the exact model of government that suited them. They would have wanted us to figure out what was best for ourselves.

We have already repudiated the single most odious idea in the original document, slavery. No one with a brain and a conscience regrets that repudiation. Rather, we acknowledge that the Framers made that retrospectively immoral compromise because the alternative would have been disunion.

Repudiating slavery took an unbelievably bloody civil war. That's not how we must fix our governance, today or ever again.

We're stuck for now with the onerous high bar that the Constitution itself mandates to amend it. However, we would make better progress if we first tackled the mystical and unthinking respect we grant the Founders.

The Founders were not gods. We should never be afraid to challenge their legacy. To maintain a principle without understanding why you do so is at best foolish; at worst, it could be self-destructive. Ditto with respect to ignoring a principle that goes unmentioned in the Constitution. That the Founders didn't mention certain ideas, like privacy, doesn't mean we shouldn't consider them.

Looking backwards to "honor" the "original intentions" of those who wrote the words of the Constitution is an abdication of our shared responsibility to live according to its core principles. (That's true even if the words in question were written by later generations.)

If you flatter yourself that you are committed simultaneously to cherishing the Constitution and governing ourselves in accordance with its most important principles, then you must support at least one of the following options:

• Identifying the most important principles to us today, whether or not they're explicitly written in the Constitution, then interpreting the Constitution and our body of laws according to those principles; or
• Making it significantly easier for the modern United States to amend the Constitution so those unwritten but crucial principles are explictily written down.

Resist the urge to think of the Constitution as sacred, something to be kept inviolate because of the semidivine status of the Framers. The Framers aren't trying to muddle through the modern world, we are. It's our country and our Constitution now.