I have long felt that the first episode of any podcast involving the constitution should be about Jefferson's belief that the constitution should be changed every 20 years. But to do that, you need a high bar of civic education where every school child in America gets together as a class and makes a constitution and then likely again in High School. The act of making a constitution; especially if they act out making it work in a fashion similar to the National Crisis Decision Making game or "Larp" so they can see what works, and what happens when people have an agenda; where the parts of power that consolidate or where the exceptions or edge cases can be abused, they will get a much more concrete idea of how the actual government works and know what they are reading about in the news.
Constitutions must be changed. I have spoken about this before. People from 200 years ago would not and frankly could not know about what faces us today; the franchise of voting has expanded, the issues facing us are very different from weapons of mass destruction to gun control or social media. Broad sweeping generalities like "Congress shall make no law abridging speech" has allowed the pernicious Alien and Sedition Acts, the House on UnAmerican Affairs Committee or FOSTA which persecutes women who try to make a living as a sex worker. And yet at the same time, we allow Fox News or Cloud Flare or Corporate Personhood and deny basic services to our citizens.
Climate change alone proves there is a system failure of our government but no reasonable mechanism to address it with antiquated states and a bar that allows Oligarchs to dominate the process. Change has to start somewhere, and grass roots is always where meaningful change for the United States has always originated. It should start in school but I would love to see Constitutional LARP groups meet and build their own governments experimenting with what does and doesnt work long before state governments try out their own.
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