In The Beginning

My general conclusion is we have gotten “billions and billions of miles” away from what this Country was intended to be. Every two weeks or so, my goal is to discuss one section of the Constitution. No, I am not an attorney, nor do I wish to be one. This is not intended to be an “originalist” interpretation. It is an interpretation, of course. But all the drafters and influencers of the drafters are dead. I cannot, nor, I submit, can anyone else, speak for them. Regardless of what they have written, we know not what they thought and meant.

Premises

• As institutions get larger and larger, they gather more layers, have more loci of power and expertise, and often develop their own vision, mission, and foundation.

• The entity becomes harder and harder to steer, to maintain course, to even set direction, and to maintain unity.

• Execution becomes bogged down as hundreds of thousands, even millions of people have to become committed, because effectiveness requires commitment - and getting this many people believing and committed is difficult.

• What you or I consider to be waste is someone else’s necessity.

• Money is a huge motivator, most of us don’t understand it and think we are objective, and at times it creates insidious bias.

• We have lacked, for many moons, a coherent strategy for our country and subsequently our government.

• Each President/Party wants to change the culture of our governmental workforce.

• No strategy and inconsistent culture create inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and inconsistent (often awful) execution.

What I hope to do is take a current, maybe call it modern, view of our founding document. I hope to find disproving evidence for my premises, and I will try to answer these (and perhaps more, or fewer) questions:

1. Has our culture evolved in such a way as to make the continuation of this grand experiment impossible?

2. What does the Constitution mean now?

3. In what ways have we forgotten or moved away from the principles established in the Constitution?

4. How should our laws be shaped to be consistent with the Constitution?

5. Have we made our laws and regulations overly complex?

6. Can we simplify our governance?

7. Can we extend this form of governance and culture, and does that defy some cyclical law regarding the lifespan of a government and/or culture?

8. What strategy could we or should we have as a country and what should its institutional culture be?

What’s Next

We start with Article 1, Section 1.

See you next time. Thanks for reading.