Does The Constitution Still Matter?

Ask most people what they know about the Constitution and you'll likely get one of 2 immediate responses: 1) The Preamble, 2) The First Amendment. Of course, what's missing, that big thing between the preamble and the amendments....is the constitution. No one seems to know nor care what it says or means. It's become the forgotten document upon which the country was built. As we continue to move forward, we continue to move ever further from the largely states-rights based, narrowly-tailored federal government designed by James Madison and others during the Constitutional Convention, toward increased federalism, while the states become models of debility and inefficiency.

Federal elections, particularly presidential ones have the largest turnout, while local/state elections are the ones that are more likely to directly affect daily life (and ones you probably have more ability to have a voice in), providing for local cops/crime control, road improvement, building/maintaining schools, utility rates, and so on. Federal issues are all handled in DC and are controlled largely by lobbyists and special interests, and not necessarily those of the voting constituencies.

So, what do we do? Will the issues of the day (gay rights, abortion, capital punishment, etc) be decided by a conservative Supreme Court and move us back toward states rights?

There was a proposal in the early 1970's by a group led by liberal activist Robert Hutchins, who founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, for a new American constitution which proposed, in part: dividing the US into 20 regions instead of states, changing the presidency to one 9-year term, making the senators appointed not popularly elected, eliminating the Supreme Court, and so on.

Founder of the Heritage Foundation and conservative activist Paul Weyrich had this to say about the subject in 1987:
"There is a basic contradiction between the structure of our government [the Constitution] and our role as a great power. Our government was designed not to play great-power politics but to preserve domestic liberty. The Founding Fathers knew a nation with such a government could not play the role of great power"
(The link up there goes to an interesting page regarding the proposed 1995 Convention of States to call for a new Constitutional Convention)

Thomas Jefferson said in a letter to James Madison in 1789, the very year our constitution was enacted:
"it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please...Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right."
(Jefferson arrived at the 19 years figure as the length of 1 generation, calculating it earlier in the letter based on average life expectancy at the time [which, I gather, was around 55 years] while discussing the concept of national debt. Read it.)

On this 275th birthday of our nation's first president, George Washington, I feel it fitting to let him have the last word:
“The basis of our political system is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government”


What say you?