There has always been plenty of talk about what is right and wrong with the Constitution of the United States. However much of that was on the back burner until recently. Now it is different. First we saw government collapsed into non-functional partisan chaos, and then Trump demonstrated that what we thought was a government of laws was actually a government of unenforceable traditions.

So what follows is a list of issues. I won’t say it is complete or well-organized, but the problems are all serious.

• Open to dictatorial takeover

The Supreme Court was a terrible mistake.  There are no limits to its power, and it doesn’t even have to justify its decisions.  The Justices are chosen undemocratically and serve for life.  We’ve now seen they can even declare a President above the law, so that the entire Constitution is out the window.  It is a dictatorship waiting to happen.

• Open to corruption (only works because of tradition, not law)

The entire electoral apparatus belongs to the states, where it is operated by partisan officials.  It is common practice to make voting difficult in opposition districts, but that is just the beginning. The whole voting apparatus is controlled by people who gain from controlling results.  It works if people are committed to democracy, but not otherwise.  Other democratic countries have established separate, nominally non-partisan organizations to administer voting.

• Unrepresentative

The Senate is phenomenally unrepresentative.  Two senators per state means residents of small states have astonishingly outsize power.  At the very least, very large states such as California need additional Senators.  The problems of the Senate also affect the Electoral College, so that not only legislation but also Presidential elections are affected.

Then there is the whole question of gerrymandering. Computers have made this both easy and effective. The US Congress is currently so gerrymandered that very few districts have real elections. That severely limits democracy.

• Doesn’t work for states

These is an urgent need for clarify the division of responsibility between the states and the federal government.  As an example, the federal government has traditionally backed up the states for emergencies of all kinds.  That is necessary because it has greater resources as well as the ability to run deficits if necessary (which many states can’t).  With both Covid and the operation of FEMA Trump decided he was either opposed or lukewarm about it, and that was that.  The Constitution has to be explicit about responsibilities.

• Doesn’t work for the federal government

The federal government simply doesn’t work as intended.  We’ve reached an era of non-cooperation between parties, so government only works when a single party controls everything.  Between the “Hastert rule” in the House and the filibuster in the Senate, it’s easy to block everything otherwise.  That means the so-called separation of powers in government is largely non-functional  Furthermore the primary system for the nomination of candidates basically disenfranchises the political center, so that parties are by definition extreme.  That means government is either functionally blocked or unrepresentatively extreme.

• There is no protection for governmental expertise

A functioning national government needs expertise upon which to base its conclusions.  For that reason Congress created a number of bodies intentionally buffered from Presidential politics.  More recently the Supreme Court has decided that any body working in the executive acts at the discretion of the President.  It is now impossible for anyone with necessary expertise to make a career in the federal government.

• Unclear dividing lines between branches of government

The Trump administration is legislating by executive order, and the Supreme Court has decided that is okay.

• The unspecified role of parties can undercut everything else

Everything about our two-party system is outside the Constitution.  So that, as mentioned earlier, we have a primary system that disenfranchises the political center, and there is nothing in the Constitution that has any bearing on it.  The Constitution needs at the least to say how elections work.  Anything not specified is vulnerable to corruption and takeover. Non-partisan primaries with rank choice voting is a possible step in that direction.