My problems with the current Constitution include:

(1) Awkward transition between presidents; from election day to the inauguration of the next president, there are effectively two presidents — one in office, one awaiting office, and this allows confusion.

(2) Under-representation of voters from populous states in the Senate.

(3) DC voters lack representation.

(4) Supreme Court has failed to protect the federal structure with state governments having regulatory authority over their respective economies and instead promoted the shifting of power to Washington.

(5) Original Constitution fails to include a right of privacy.

(6) Possibility of a military dictatorship should a significant terrorist attack happen such as a catastrophic attack on Congress.

(7) The Electoral college system is cumbersome and confusing.

(8) Popular election of senators. Here’s a situation in which the original constitution was right (letting state governments choose Senators) but it was changed by an amendment. It’s important for state governments to choose Senators to give state governments a voice in the national government.

(9) Inability to get rid of an incompetent president quickly. Examples: Wilson (suffered from an economic malady); possibly Roosevelt in last years in office; Bush II (clearly incompetent choice to attack Iraq).

(10) Life tenure for unelected Supreme Court judges. One problem: judges are often old, feeble, unable to perform their duties. Another problem: judges can choose to retire when a like-minded president is in office, and in this way, judges can steer the ideological direction of the court. Possible solution: term limits (15 year, 18 year) for judges.

(11) The Ninth amendment has been seriously ignored.

These objections have been raised by constitutional scholars and there is fairly widespread agreement among them.

British constitutional scholar Adam Tomkins identifies a prime weakness in America’s constitution — that the prime role of checking government is supposedly handled by the judiciary, and not the legislature. He thinks the judiciary is ill-suited to rein in government ministers since it must wait for a court case to bubble up before it can act; plus, judges are not popularly elected and are therefore not accountable to the public. He thinks Britain’s system — where the Prime Minister must defend choices each week in a 30 minute meeting before Parliament — is superior to America’s. I agree.

I see more serious flaws with America’s governmental structure than the list above. The foreign policy architecture is deeply flawed — entrusting too much power in one overburdened official (the president, who has both domestic and foreign policy duties.) America’s foreign policy can only be as good as the president. An incompetent president, or one distracted with domestic matters, means that America’s foreign policy is likely to be mindless and erratic. Any intelligent review over the past 50 years of America’s foreign policy would see a long list of obvious mistakes (along with some successes, to be sure.) In the past, America could get away with this mindlessness because of its size and wealth; but in the nuclear age, foreign policy can’t be an experiment, a happenstance, rather it must be consistently sound and smart. So I propose a structure more like the Roman Senate (during the Republic years.) It rarely made mistakes. And therefore, this requires major changes to the constitution.

Further, the United States lacks an intelligent strategy to prevent terrorism. The Constitution is partly to blame here. It needs to confront the whole issue of anonymous movement in public — that is, how can we identify movement while preserving privacy? This is the key to preventing terrorism in my view.

Today’s US government is highly corrupt. Power has shifted to the president. Power is dangerously concentrated in this one office. The executive can essentially legislate by using a vast bureaucracy of agencies that are largely unaccountable to the public and hidden from debate. Presidents have begun issuing “signing statements” — a fairly recent innovation — when they describe how they intend to interpret a law made by Congress, which effectively puts a “spin” on a law. The most egregious sign of concentrated executive power is, of course, the power to start wars without Congressional approval (Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq (there was a token vote)). The Constitution explicitly gave the war-making power to Congress. So why does the president have this power?

So, for these reasons and other reasons, I’m advocating a Second Constitutional Convention to fix these flaws, and as a private citizen, I am summoning delegates to Independence Hall in Philadelphia beginning July 4th, 2009.