Is Bannon right about this one thing?

[*PhilHos*]

(02-22-2017, 04:41 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: As someone that has expressed my desire for a new constitution, I hate to say that I agree with him on the broad idea. We have the oldest written constitution still in use, today. I get that we have pride in this but this document was written when global trade took months, not seconds. It was written when 6-8 shots in a minute was the fastest you were going to to see someone pull of, when news took hours, days, or even weeks to reach the common person. The industrial revolution hadn't happened and we had an agrarian society. All of these have changed our society in ways the framers of our government could not have dreamed.

My point is, why do we debate the original intent of laws written by politicians that had no concept of the world we live in today to apply them to the world today? It just seems to me like a new constitution would better serve the people, and with it we need to set up a more representative government. I think a parliamentary system would be better, but there is also just the number of representatives as well.

There are 630 members of the Bundestag in Germany. Almost 200 more representatives in their lower house than we have. A country that has 3% of our land mass, about 25% of our population, and 18% of our nominal GDP has a representative body that is 144% the size of what we have. When I see things like this, not just in Germany, it makes me feel like we are grossly underrepresented in our federal government. This isn't even getting into how we hold elections, which is a whole other story.

Anyway, I feel like we hold onto the system we have and glorify it because our history isn't centuries old as it is in Europe. Jefferson said that a constitution naturally expires at the end of 19 years, so why are we holding onto a 228 year old constitution with such fervor?

That's the beauty of the Consitution. The framers made it possible to "update" the Constitution to keep up with the times. It's not their fault that the country has come to be run by a bunch of idiots and golddiggers bent on doing only what benefits them with a populace that has become increasingly more and more uninformed.