So, if we were designing the American system of government anew, what wouldn’t we do again?
First and most obviously, we would not have a Second Amendment. If we were installing a new government, would we really insist on including a poorly-written, confusing right to firearm ownership? I think not.
The United States is unique in its devotion to gun ownership and the degree to which its citizens live in fear of guns and their owners. No other nation in the world approaches America’s rate of gun ownership (#2 on the list, Yemen, has less than half as many guns per capita). There’s a good reason that every other nation controls gun ownership much more than we do— the link between gun ownership and gun violence is well documented.
The only reason that a large portion of the American public considers gun ownership a fundamental right is that it’s in the Constitution, and many Americans revere the Constitution. But if we were starting over, we would never include a blanket right to firearm ownership in the first place. We would not seek to implement a policy that is guaranteed to make us less safe.
The other obvious one is the Electoral College. It’s our constitutional appendix, a vestigial organ that we don’t notice until it malfunctions and endangers us.
The idea of voting to elect a group of people who then select our president for us is fundamentally undemocratic. It might have sounded good to the powdered-wig aristocrats who wrote the Constitution, but it’s clearly a bad idea now. And the way in which it weights states’ votes is obviously unfair.
If we were designing a new government, nobody would suggest a complicated scoring system that privileges low-population states and runs the risk of the less popular candidate winning. We’d just go with the popular vote because that’s obviously more democratic and fair.
Plus, the Electoral College increases opportunities for electoral shenanigans and loss of public faith in the government. None of the chaos around the 2000 election and none of the lies and violence on January 6th would have happened in America without an Electoral College.
If we started from scratch, I doubt we’d have our current system of electing Senators, either. It seems pretty dumb to have a system in which one person in Wyoming gets the same amount of representation in the Senate as 59 Californians. I’d imagine we would not have an upper house of Congress at all, make the states more equal in population, or find some other way to make the Senate make sense.
We wouldn’t put justices on the Supreme Court for life, either. When the Constitution was written, the average life expectancy for an American was in the 30s (those who made it past childhood usually lived into their early 60s). Now, a judge appointed in his 40s could conceivably be on the court for close to half a century. That’s dumb, and I doubt we would do that today.
In fact, I wonder whether we’d have a presidential system at all. The United States has invaded its share of countries, and we’ve installed new governments in a lot of them. Most of the time, we haven’t put in place a system of government like our own. instead, we tend to establish parliamentary systems, as we did in Germany, Japan, and Iraq. Is this because a presidential system is inferior — too open to authoritarianism and too prone to gridlock? Maybe we’d choose to install a parliamentary government here, too, if we had the chance.