It took 76 years for people to get around to amending the Constitution to eliminate slavery, and it took 131 years for them to give women the right to vote. Furthermore, when slavery was abolished, it was done so at the barrel of a gun...not because three-fourths of the states ACTUALLY wanted it abolished. That's a pretty major flaw, both in the original absence of those things and the amendment process itself. The amendment process is grossly insufficient for allowing necessary changes to the Constitution.
That is a major flaw in the people of the country, not in the Constitution, which never made
any position on women's rights or slavery to begin with. The fact that such things actually went so far as to be put into the Constitution rather than continually decided at a state level as was intended just shows that the amendment process, though difficult, isn't as difficult as you made it out to be.
I'm not going to worship the Founding Fathers just because you think it might be bad for the country if I don't. That's just a fallacious variation on Pascal's Wager. The Founding Fathers were human beings who made mistakes, and the document they wrote was far from perfect.
Several straw men here. I never asked to you worship the Founding Fathers, nor did I say they weren't mistake-prone human beings or that the Constitution is perfect.
Actually they did. The world has changed in unimaginable ways. Suppose you were writing a Constitution from scratch that you intended to last until 2200. What would you include?
About 90% of what was written in 1787.
Yes, it was in the Constitution 76 years later, after a bloody civil war and southern states grudgingly ratified it under the barrel of a gun. It certainly was not one of the Founding Fathers' ideas. The existence of SOME Founding Fathers who were abolitionists is irrelevant, as I'm sure you could find SOME Founding Fathers who supported any number of ideas you'd reject which didn't make it into the Constitution.
Again, the Constitution pre-Civil War took no position on slavery at all. It could very well have been banned without an amendment specifically doing so.
That's fine as long as we use a living document approach so that we don't have to amend the Constitution. But if you demand an originalist interpretation AND an incredibly difficult amendment process, our government would never evolve much beyond what it was in 1789. This is impractical. There was nothing special about that particular moment in history that made it the ideal time on which to model a government.
If you accept a living document approach then we are in agreement.
This all depends on what is meant by a "living document". If by "living document" one means "the document means whatever I want it to mean", there's no point in having a written Constitution in the first place. Whereas if it means "vague passages will have to be interpreted to fit unforseen issues", then basically
everyone favors a living document approach, including the Framers.
It is. The Founding Fathers didn't give a damn where the president was born, the anti-federalists just hated Hamilton.
...Are you serious? You seemed to be too knowledgeable to say something as non-sensical as the notion that
anti-federalists had any say in what went into the Constitution, when they were the ones who opposed ratifying the Constitution in the first place. Anyways, here's from Wikipedia:
[ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_born_citizen]Natural born citizen of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]
The Oxford English Dictionary defines "natural born" as "[h]aving a specified position or character by birth." 7 OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY 38 (1961) so in English the phrase refers to anyone who is a citizen from birth. There is no record of a debate on the requirements to meet the "natural born Citizen" qualification during the Constitutional Convention. This clause was introduced by the drafting Committee of Eleven, and then adopted without discussion by the Convention as a whole. One possible source of the clause can be traced to Alexander Hamilton, a delegate to the Convention. On June 18, 1787, Hamilton submitted to the Convention a sketch of a plan of government. Article IX, section 1 of Hamilton's plan provided:
No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a Citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a Citizen of the United States."[2]
Another possible source of the clause is a July 25, 1787 letter from John Jay to George Washington, presiding officer of the Convention. Jay wrote:
Permit me to hint whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government, and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen.[3]
The term "natural born citizen" was defined by Emmerich de Vattel as "those born in the country, of parents who are citizens."[4]
So not only did Hamilton first propose a similar requirement, but Jay, who I'm fairly sure held no hostility towards Hamilton (he helped write the Federalist Papers), wanted it for reasons that had nothing to do with Hamilton.
Not to mention, Hamilton may have been as eligible to run for President as anyone else of the time, since they were all born as residents of British colonies, and not as citizens of a country that did not yet exist. Hamilton may have been able to pull off a run for the presidency had he not been shot so soon.
I don't think people should worship Lincoln any more than I think they should worship the Founding Fathers.
That's cool, I'm not asking you to. But my point had
nothing to do with Lincoln. My point was that by your logic, blacks should never have been given the right to vote, because the people who did that didn't want women to vote too.
If they were wrong about some things, then what makes you think that everything (or almost everything) that made it into the Constitution was infallible? Just because they AGREED on certain things doesn't make them right, as they could've all been in agreement on the same wrong ideas. And it CERTAINLY doesn't make them right for what policies work best for the United States in 2010, which looks nothing like the country they founded.
So besides issues which the Constitution originally took no stance at all on, and issues which have made it in since, what made it in there that was wrong?
I'll give you the natural born clause, and the electoral college. But is there anything a bit less trivial?
OK, here. I'll write a constitution, and I'd like your assessment of it:
There, I included an amendment process. If there are any problems in this document, they can be addressed at a later time. My constitution is pretty much the perfect document, right?
Oh brother. Fallacies galore. Ignoring that a 99% majority is not even close to the same as a 2/3 and 3/4 majority, in your example the problem is
caused by the Constitution, whereas in the examples you were addressing- slavery and women's rights- the problem had
nothing to do with the Constitution, and were eventually put in there as a matter of formality.