No, James Madison wasn’t an idiot; he just didn’t have the fortune telling powers to see 200 years into the future. Women’s rights, black rights, and overall ridiculous laws were made when muskets were high-tech and horses were Jeeps. In this day and age, Big Pharma, the immigration crisis, and many of the biggest problems could be solved by scrubbing away the grime and starting anew.

Firstly, the rhetoric the Constitution currently has benefits white, landowning men; and doesn’t even address the problems being created by the melting pot we currently have. One of the best examples of this is the United States’ police brutality puzzle; this system has officials being taught to racially profile at the same time when cops are killing black people in broad daylight. The fourth amendment specifically protects police officers with a clause called qualified immunity. The executive orders on immigration (such as DACA being repealed and children of deported migrants in camps)  need to be criminalized. Solving a big social problem such as inequality or racism as a whole through the government is mostly impossible, but we, as a society, should be willing to do anything to help that issue grow smaller. The biggest reasons to start afresh is to have a set of regulations that function in an advanced society as opposed to a set that can bend and hypothetically be applied to a advanced society. It’s notable to include that the way citizens do taxes, conduct daily life, and interact with one another now is completely different than it was in the 1700s. We have skyscrapers, three-course meals made in under 20 minutes, and people now think it’s wrong that 80% of our representative body is male. Our ideals as a society have changed, and thus, so should our rules and regulations.

If the highest judges in the United States have to make decisions that all 300 million or so Americans have to follow (regarding abortion, gay marriage, etc.), their guiding rulebook should be up to date and fit to work in a society that has evolved past printing presses and just the discovery of electricity.

This isn’t to say that the Constitution doesn’t work, but the Constitution isn’t successful and hasn’t been successful in being for the people, nevermind By or Of the people. Yes, our founding fathers looked to the future, but how far could they have possibly looked? Did Thomas Jefferson predict Cardi B and Nicki Minaj’s physical fight at the 2018 New York Fashion Week? Did Alexander Hamilton daydream about Mexican children being held in internment camps simply due to the fact that their parents were ripped away from them by the government? No, they didn’t.

They looked ahead and decided that amendments would have to be made at some point, but amendments aren’t enough. We have come to a point in modern day society that the Constitution’s ‘amendments’ are simply band-aids over a canyon.  America won’t need these band-aids for several hundred years if the Constitution is rewritten.

At this point in time, the founding fathers and architects of such a specific and thorough documents couldn’t possibly have predicted the world crises that our political structure faces today. It would be unrealistic if they did. Sure, “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken”, but first, find the tools to recognize a broken system.