Imagining a more perfect union
If you think there’s a lot wrong with the Constitution we inherited, you’re right. But you’re wrong if you think there is nothing we, the people, can do about it. The last time the Constitution was amended was in 1992, and it was thanks to Gregory Watson. As a college student in 1982, he launched a decade-long campaign to pass the 27th Amendment regulating pay raises for members of Congress.
Isn’t it about time for a 28th Amendment?
Today is Constitution Day, commemorating the day the delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787. Those founders created a document embodying a vision of republican government that was truly remarkable for its time. But since then, later generations of Americans have democratized that 18th-century vision by expanding the original notion of “we, the people” beyond white men of property.
The 15th Amendment prohibited denial or abridgement of the right to vote on the basis of race; the 19th on the basis of sex; the 26th, added in 1971, on the basis of age for anyone over 18; and the 24th banned poll taxes in federal elections.
The people of Brooklyn have figured out what else we need to create a more perfect union: even more democracy.
Last year, Brooklyn Public Library invited the general public to diagnose and fix the Constitution. Hundreds of people participated in 32 town halls to study the Constitution, analyze what they thought was right or wrong with it, and discuss how to address the flaws in a new amendment. Their ideas were captured in verbatim notes. I served as one of four “framers” charged with distilling that cornucopia of ideas into the form of a single, cogent amendment.
Our proposed “Brooklyn Amendment” would take the next steps in the journey toward true democracy. Its highlights include abolishing the Electoral College and allowing presidents to be elected by popular vote, making Election Day a national holiday, guaranteeing that the right to vote not be restricted for any citizen, and conferring a full right to vote on citizens living in the District of Columbia.
Another theme frequently sounded in the town halls was that our Constitution is almost exclusively negative. It identifies many things the government is not allowed to do — such as censoring our speech or taking our property — but does not charge the government with doing anything affirmative to promote the right everyone should have to education, housing, health care, food security, and a clean and healthy environment. And so our 28th
Amendment would also incorporate the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an aspirational document adopted by the countries of the United Nations. That document’s champion, Eleanor Roosevelt, believed that a statement of affirmative rights and obligations should be the next stage of our democratic development.
Of course, not all Americans would agree with these particular goals. Democracy means that everyone should be invited to study what’s in the Constitution and discuss its fundamental principles as well as its deficiencies. Brooklyn Public Library has even created a free toolkit that libraries and schools can use to develop their own 28th Amendment.
In this time of hyperpartisanship, when we seem so irremediably divided, the best way forward may be to engage in serious discussions about whether we can all still agree to the quintessential ideas already embedded in the Constitution and how we can democratically process our divergent aspirations for constitutional change. We cannot afford to let fear of our different perspectives prevent us from having this necessary dialogue. After all, the Constitution’s framers — federalists and anti-federalists, slaveholders and abolitionists — were deeply and bitterly divided on many key issues but nevertheless debated until they managed to hammer out a document they were all willing to sign.
Even the most optimistic Brooklynite, of course, would not realistically expect our multi-faceted amendment to be added to the Constitution any time soon. The amendment process is demanding and could take even longer than the decade Gregory Watson invested in his amendment. But all change begins with seeds. An amendment campaign can be educational and transformative, giving people a focal point for organizing. It took decades for the 19th Amendment to be adopted (and we’re still working to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, 50 years after its introduction), but the women’s suffrage movement inspired many states to guarantee women’s voting rights on their own and, over time, changed public opinion. The suffragists achieved what was long dismissed as the impossible goal of persuading American men to vote to split their political power with women.
The Constitution belongs to all of us. What better way to celebrate its birthday than by becoming a framer of the U.S. Constitution 28.0?