There are many reasons to do this, but I'm going to start with four and my counter argument against them.
1) "We should honor the Founding Fathers!"
There is this idea that somehow the Founding Fathers are somehow sacrosanct and holy individuals that should be revered. I have no problem with this. They were remarkable men that performed a remarkable act. They put together one of the most enduring documents of all time. Their work has stood strong for two centuries, and in truth could probably function for another two more. Having said that, I believe that there are people who hold more reverence for the Founding Fathers than they do their own diety, or (in the more common place) religious teachers of their own belief set. The Cult of the Constitution is alive and well.
Most people don't take it that far of course, but from our earliest days we are taught that the Constitution is a miracle and that it has helped our nation be set apart above all others.
And yet, many of the founding fathers thought that creating another constitution was a very good idea. In fact, they did it themselves. If we really honored the Founding Fathers we would be willing to repeat their steps when needed to revive the constitution. They actually put a clause in the Constitution itself that allows another Constitution convention. The Founding Fathers looked forward to the future despite the fact that they took inspiration from the past.
I believe we need to go farther than this, and I'll explain the reasons for that in another post, but regardless, if the Founding Fathers were so against the idea of a reboot, why did they put the very idea in Article V?
2) God Inspired the Constitution.
It is actually a component of the religious belief of some sects that the Constitution really IS a holy document albiet primarily as a vehicle to allow the said sect to come into fruition.
However they also cite a chain of documents from the Bible, down through the Magna Carta or even in certain cases ancient Babylonian Law or the Roman Senate as part of a chain of events allowed, created and enhanced by God.
If such were the case, why would God cease to inspire men to do something better, taking the lessons that He has taught them in the past? Is God dead? And if not, then why would He cease to inspire us to greater forms of government?
3) The Alternative Might Be Worse
A convincing argument can be made that given the charged political environment we live in right now, that a significant amount of representatives from Conservative states would try to incorporate things that would be dire, or highly undesirable. Right now we live in an environment where we not only have two different viewpoints (and there are many) but I argue that we have (at the least) two versions of reality itself, with different camps accepting basic scientific facts as subjective things. Science and the reflection of objective reality that it gives us has become optional.
Here is my counter argument.
We have many people in this day and age who are passionate about their viewpoints. However, unlike the last time we had a constitutional convention; we have no one who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to own another human being. We really don’t have many people who think the idea of a monarchy is a really good idea. We don’t have that many who believe that the poor deserve no right to vote (at least publicly anyway.) They also generally (with the possible exception of Texas) don’t hold more loyalty to their STATE than they do the union. Americans these days call themselves Americans before they call themselves Georgians, Texans or Californians.
The Founding Fathers were amazing human beings, but they had also just fought a war. That has its advantages and its disadvantages. It meant that they had a bonding experience, including such heroes such as George Washington who was able to bridge otherwise unbridgeable differences. But at the same time, they were all rich, white men who had very specific ideas about the way the world was supposed to work, long before the discovery of Evolution, Chaos Theory, Relativity or Quantum Physics.
More importantly, any ratification procedure will require at LEAST the majority of the states, and whichever version of reality you prefer is not going to be able to simply run roughshod over the other view point in order to make the constitution pass. Plus, remember that for this to become a reality you have to convince enough people that it is time to make a new constitution in the first place. That’s not going to happen unless you can convince people that THEIR viewpoint will be reflected in the constitution at least partially.
4) We Should Just Amend The Constitution
Amending the constitution is hard. It is ridiculously hard. Most people say that this is a feature, not a bug and they’d be right. The system of checks and balances has protected us from ‘the whim of the mob’ for quite some time. People act in a dumb fashion when given a chance to panic. People also act corrupt when they get too much power, so by channeling that power into divided aspects of time, to make change hard, the Constitution has above all given us STABILITY which I argue is the primary source of our nation’s wealth. Businesses thrive in a predictable climate and our constitution has allowed much of our government to thrive because change could be predicted until a huge portion of society was utterly outraged at the implications of something, like, for example, sending huge numbers of 18 year olds off to war but not allowing them to vote for the same politicians who were sending them out to die.
Here is my counter argument.
Entropy is the single law of the universe. Everything we know, or at least everything we can scientifically observe decays. No matter how well set up, things are born, they mature and then they die. Sometimes they are able to reproduce and give new life and thus the cycle is renewed, but nothing lives forever.
Our living constitution has reached a point where there are so many flaws, so many holes that I argue that a single amendment is not enough to fix it. A constitutional convention with numerous amendments is the second best way, because we need to fix A LOT, but I will argue in my next post why simple amendments will not do.
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