The USA was designed, but there were huge omissions in the design. This doesn’t reflect poorly on the founders. They were humans, limited, fallible. They did something new and novel and did a good job. But they were human- the Constitution is not perfect.

Over the years, we’ve come to revere the Constitution. That’s wrong. It’s a big obstacle to us amending it. In the last 250 years, we’ve progressed and vastly changed everything about life- sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. Our bodies of knowledge about science, technology, ethics, productivity, governance, law, sociology and psychology and more are vastly larger than when America was formed, yet we have barely applied any of that to the Constitution.

The Constitution is flawed mostly by its omissions. Here are my top 8:

1. People’s rights weren’t specified. This was rectified pretty quickly in the Bill of RIghts. This is well known, but I mention it because many speak of the US Constitution as if it’s a perfect document. It never was.
2. Political parties were omitted. The founders didn’t want them, but designed nothing to keep them out or limit them. Over the centuries, they’ve become the center of power and corruption.
3. Corruption of Congress wasn’t addressed. The Constitution includes some rules about presidential corruption and ensuring foreign governments don’t influence elections. But Congress is famously corrupt. From insider stock trading to bail-outs to receiving money from federal contractors to buying seats on committees to becoming lobbyists when they retire from politics, Congress is corrupt and does nothing about it. Represent.us is a huge organization tackling this head on, but is barely making progress. 
4. Rules about corporations were omitted. The evil of corporations was implicit in the founder’s culture. The revolutionary war was as much against the British East India Company as it was against England. There were no corporations as we know them in America before the civil war. Corporations were created by states for finite periods of times and for only one specific purpose and they weren’t allowed to change. Their evil was something that everyone knew at the time, so they thought it didn’t have to be mentioned. Over time, without corporations ruining society, Americans forgot how important it was to control them.
5. Lobbying was completely taboo (evil. to the founders. People had a right to petition government, but not to hire someone to petition for them, definitely not a fancy-dressed lawyer and certainly not a former politician. Plus, petitioning happened in public, with no money changing hands. Lobbying happens in private, usually involving bribes. This was also omitted from the Constitution because everyone agreed out it at the time. The constitution doesn’t say that murder or theft is illegal, either, for the same reasons.
6. Instructions for changing the Constitution were incomplete. They laid out the amendment process and the constitutional convention, but they didn’t foresee that the Constitution would become so revered that people would be so reluctant to change it. Like the second amendment about “the right to bear arms”- we no longer understand its meaning, instead we argue. The founders certainly never envisioned weapons as small and deadly as semi-automatic rifles or hand-grenades. The Constitution says there should be no funding for an army for more than 2 years! We violate that instead of changing it. In hindsight, the Constitution should have a regular review and renewal every 10-20 years. Plus we have no rules at all for how or when to create a constitutional convention.
7. They didn’t make it illegal for candidates or elected officials to lie. Not everyone in the 1700’s was honest, but the founders assumed that elected officials would mostly be honest and honorable. This is no longer true. At the organization The People’s Convention, such a law is at the top of their list.
8. They didn’t describe what was required for democracy to work. They designed roughly how our government would work, but not why. We have problems in every major facet of politics:  voters, campaigns, candidates, elections, incumbents, representation, parties, congress, influence and now media. Yet we mostly see these as all separate problems (none of which we’ve fixed), instead of seeing that there’s a deeper problem causing that. That means as we discover things not working, we don’t know why. With all of our knowledge, it’s surprising that almost no one has looked at a key foundation of democracy that’s unstated and missing. Providing this missing piece is PeopleCount’s purpose. Once we have it, we’ll be able to fix all of the problems.

With all of these constitutional flaws, you’d think America would have had more problems. It has! American history is full of stories of corruption, political lies and machinations. Atop the swamp, though, we keep telling ourselves America is great. We white-wash our history so that kids can love their country. But it only makes it easier for the corruption to continue.

Let’s make America great for the first time. Let’s be honest that the Constitution was well done, but not perfect.  Let’s start by fixing it’s foundation.