Losing Constitutional Competition
By Joel S. Hirschhorn
Global Research, March 3, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29593
Among
Americans there remains strong pride about the US Constitution, even
though there is widespread support for creating reform amendments to it. Globally, however, what should surprise Americans is a significant loss of respect for it. Other nations, especially those creating new democracies, see better constitutions elsewhere. This is not opinion. It is fact. And it is important to understand this historic shift.
A new university study
sends a disturbing message to all Americans that want to hang on to the
fiction that the US constitution is not only the world’s best one, but
does not need to be improved. Do not mentally block this
finding: “The U.S. Constitution appears to be losing its appeal as a
model for constitutional drafters elsewhere,” according to the study by
David S. Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of
the University of Virginia.
What exists today is far different than what was proudly proclaimed in 1987, on the Constitution’s bicentennial, by Time magazine which
calculated that “of the 170 countries that exist today, more than 160
have written charters modeled directly or indirectly on the U.S.
version.”
Why
has the US Constitution lost standing abroad even though Americans
cling to their belief that it is sacred and the world’s best
constitution?
The
new study examined the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188
countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding
various rights and ways to enforce them. This is what
they found: “Among the world’s democracies constitutional similarity to
the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over
the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more
similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s
and 1990s. ... the constitutions of the world’s
democracies are, on average, less similar to the U.S. Constitution now
than they were at the end of World War II.”
Professor
Law identified a central reason for the trend: the availability of
newer, sexier and more powerful operating systems in the constitutional
marketplace. “Nobody wants to copy Windows 3.1,” he said. In other words, the US Constitution is old and out of date.
A Supreme Court Justice has also weighed in. In a television interview
during a recent visit to Egypt , Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “I
would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a
constitution in the year 2012.” She recommended, instead,
the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights. Such a view should be respected.
Should Americans disregard these findings and perspectives? Absolutely not. Only
if more people pay attention to this global trend will they better see
the need to seriously consider constitutional amendments to improve
American democracy. The core problem, however, is one shortcoming of the US Constitution: the great difficulty in amending it. In
this regard, noted legal authority Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in
his book “Our Undemocratic Constitution” that “the U.S. Constitution is
the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in
the world today.”
All
over the country diverse people and groups on the right and left are
advocating for reform amendments, such as getting all private money out
of politics, creating term limits for Congress, removing personhood for
corporations, and imposing a balanced budget requirement on Congress.
The
problem is that Congress is quite unlikely to propose serious reform
amendments, which means that the option in the Constitution for an
Article V convention of state delegates must be used. But
Congress refuses to obey the Constitution by ignoring the hundreds of
state applications for a convention from 49 states, more than the single
requirement of two-thirds of states in Article V. Learn more at the website of Friends of the Article V Convention, the nonpartisan national group advocating for the first convention.
Consider this: Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. But it would be silly to propose a totally new US Constitution; that is too radical an idea. However, it is amazing that Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison,
noted that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19
years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” Too bad the Constitution gives Congress the power to convene an Article V convention.
Americans
should wake up, stop their delusional thinking and recognize that the
US Constitution needs to be updated through reform amendments. We the people must pressure Congress to convene the first Article V convention. Otherwise
the Supreme Court will continue to make interpretations that are more
political than legal in nature and the federal government will continue
to erode personal freedoms and liberties. And more and more other democracies will operate under better constitutions.
Contact Joel S. Hirschhorn through delusionaldemocracy.com.
