American View: America must get its act together while it still can

Responsible Business15 Jul 2026

My buddy Jack is a veteran, a Hollywood actor, and a professional voiceover artist. We met at university and were in the Army R.O.T.C. program together.

My buddy Jack is a veteran, a Hollywood actor, and a professional voiceover artist. We met at university and were in the Army R.O.T.C. program together. He graduated before I did, but we’ve stayed in touch since. That was why Jack phoned me Friday night: to catch up. After the pleasantries and life updates, we got to griping about current events. How could we not given … everything? We discussed the sewer that is American politics, the GAI bubble, the Iran War, and the Schrodinger’s Turtle kerfuffle at length, before Jack surprised me by suggesting “we need a new Constitution.”

I asked if he’d allow me to share his argument with y’all and he agreed. Here’s his pitch, in as close to his own word as I could remember:

First, let me acknowledge the paradox of a man sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States saying, “we need a new Constitution.” This makes me feel a little light-headed. I would never suggest such a thing if I did not believe the need was dire and immediate, and that the only way to preserve the spirit of our laws is to rewrite the letter.

President Trump and his enablers crossed a red line when they tried to overturn birthright citizenship. That right is guaranteed in our Constitution by the 14th Amendment. Remove that legal obstacle and, in essence, Trump could dictate who is and is not a citizen. No American would be safe from statelessness and the sudden removal of all other legal rights at Trump’s caprice. Fortunately, even the extremists currently passing as our Supreme Court considered this move toward fascism too bald and brazen.

It was a close-run thing! It appears they’ll keep trying, because the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v Sanford decision is still on the books, and only the 14th Amendment protects us from it: “Any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, is not a citizen of the United States, according to the U.S. Constitution.”

I thought we’d made it clear that this was unacceptable when Sherman burned Atlanta

Amendments can be repealed. The 18th Amendment prohibited manufacturing, transporting, and selling booze, and the 21st Amendment simply reads, “The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.” We’ve done it before; this administration seems hell-bent on doing it again.

Some of President Trump’s supporters would very much like the 14th Amendment to be repealed, because – rightly or wrongly – they believe it would be their African-American neighbour, or the Latino family down the street, or the gay couple in their workplace who would be stripped of citizenship and deported, not themselves. In a similar vein, there are calls to do away with women’s right to vote, ceding that power exclusively to their husbands, so the 19th Amendment is in their crosshairs next. Meanwhile, some religious leaders are trying to dispense with the 1st Amendment language partitioning church and state.

It isn’t easy to repeal a Constitutional Amendment, but look how much the administration has achieved in violating norms and dismantling governance to-date:

It’s no wonder that the same people responsible for these attacks on the foundations of our body of laws feel confident that they’ll be able to repeal a bunch of amendments. That’s why, I contend, we must crush that dark and twisted dream once and for all.

Preferably before things get way out of hand.

We’re struggling with all our might to preserve, and we have placed all our hopes upon, a quarter-millennia-old document that was written by slavers, before the Industrial Revolution, back when ponies carried the mail. The structural flaws of the document originally written by Thomas Jefferson, a man who kept and forced himself upon a fourteen-year-old named Sally Hemings, have grown painfully evident. No amount of patches, kludges, and jury-rigging can alter its fundamental nature as a relic of a slaver state. Its internal contradictions follow from the man himself, one hand writing, “We the People” while the other cracks a whip.

I contend we must craft a new Constitution and canonize our rights. Throw in all the other reforms we’ve desperately needed as well: age limits, medical authority to relieve, term limits, ranked voting, impartial algorithm apportioning voting districts, on and on…! Consecrate our nation – for real this time! – to “liberty and justice for all.” If we want the U.S.A. to survive, people living in the ‘blue states’ must write and ratify a new Constitution. Our ‘inalienable human rights’ exist today as amendments subject to repeal. We need a new Constitution enshrining those rights within the core document, that are specifically not subject to repeal without annulling the entire document and with it all rule of law.

Responsible statesmen must ratify the new Constitution, and tell their opponents, “Ratify this, or you go it alone! Try to make it in the world without our apolitical military protecting you, and without our economic subsidies keeping your lights on, your schools open, and your roads paved.” The blue states wield the nation’s economic might of the nation and it’s well past time we flexed those muscles. The blue states enjoy the trust of our neighbours and former allies, while red states are becoming international pariahs. To put it in President Trump’s terms, “red states, you don’t have the cards.”

I can see Texas trying to go it alone and making a complete hash of it.

Of course, many of the red states will refuse on principle, or simply out of sheer spite. The U.S.A. will schism on maps the same way it schismed culturally, politically, and intellectually over the last decade. There will be suffering before they come to terms. But come to terms they will, because the divorced states can’t sell their potatoes when their roads disintegrate.

It’s time to replace our Constitution before it’s completely undone by schemers who intend to replace our republic with an autocratic ethnostate. To prevent that nightmare from becoming reality, we must retire that venerable document with reverence to a museum before it loses what little legitimacy it has left. We must rein in those who are utterly unfit to reign.

That’s where we left it … Jack gave me a lot to ponder.

I agree with him that the people dismantling our institutions, our laws, and our Constitution must be stopped if the nation is to survive. Their objectives are clear and undeniable: tear down all the foundational laws and principles that made us … well, us. Turn the nation into a hereditary kleptocracy. Eradicate the middle class. Bring back every bad idea that our predecessors managed to eliminate. Might as well bring back the Great Influenza epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic for a reunion tour.

Still … I have a hard time believing that state politics can or will save us from our national $&%@-show. I suspect it would be faster and easier for the Fortune 500 to foreclose on the U.S.A., put it under interim management, and restructure it since all this destructive turmoil is bad for business.

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