I set out to fix American governance.
First I had to fix my own. The second job turned out to be 323 pages.
Picture a stranger at your door. “Hi, I would like to help rewrite the Constitution. Can I count on your trust?”
The correct answer is “no.” Possibly followed by a slow closing of the door.
That is the problem we had to solve. ReDrafting America asks the country to consider a rebirth: a better constitution, written together, adopted by the people. The obvious question to ask back is whether the group doing the asking has ever managed that for itself.
So we went first. Before asking the country to write a second draft, we had to write one of our own. It turns out the two stories have the same plot: a first draft that was too small for the job, and a second draft that took a great deal of time and patience.
The first draft had a flaw. The flaw was me.
The first Bylaws were written in 2025 for the Utopia Project, in North Carolina. They ran 29 pages and 18 Articles, and they were built around exactly one person.
In the opening period, the Board was me. Any material change to the mission needed my written consent. I was the Board, the Founder, and the veto, all in one chair.
There is a word for a system where one person holds every seat. “Constitution” is not it.
So we started over. The Utopia Project became ReDrafting America, moved to Pennsylvania, and was rebuilt from the foundation. “Rebirth” is the polite word. The accurate one is “tore it down to the studs.” The new Bylaws run 323 pages across 24 Articles, and the very first line is a confession: “One person wrote these Bylaws. No single person writes a constitution.”
Yes, the opening sentence of our governing document is an apology. We consider it good manners.
We were in good company
The country has been here before. The first draft of the United States was the Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1777 and in force from 1781. It gave the central government no power to tax and little power to regulate commerce or settle fights between the states (National Archives). Good intentions, wrong size for the job.
The founders did not patch it. They wrote a second draft, which took a long summer in Philadelphia and a lot of arguing. Even then they were not done. The Constitution has been amended 27 times.
So the pattern is clear. The first draft is too small. The second is slow and painful. Revising never really ends. We were not the first to learn this. We were just the first to learn it on a nonprofit.
What a second draft costs
Second drafts are expensive. Because I am the kind of person who counts, here is the bill for ours:
- The size: 323 pages, 94,894 words, and 693,406 characters.
- The structure: 24 Articles, 178 Sections, 262 Subsections, 22 sub-subsections, and 3,799 paragraphs, 680 of them in lists.
- The vocabulary: 108 defined terms, because everything has to mean exactly one thing.
- The wiring: 358 internal links, 218 page references, 418 bookmarks, and 28 external links. (The document spends a lot of time talking to itself.)
- The emphasis: 2,032 bold words, 4,210 italic words, and 1,678 underlined words. Emphasis is a coping mechanism.
- The extras: 20 tables, 2 figures, 6 images, and 4 fonts.
- Appearances of the word “monster”: 0. I checked. Twice.
That is the paperwork for a Board of fourteen. We do not have an army, a tax code, or a single acre of territory.
In fairness, the U.S. Constitution has 7,591 words, including all 27 amendments (Constitution Facts). Our Bylaws are about twelve and a half of them. Brevity is a skill, and the Framers had it. We are working on ours.
But the point is not who wrote more. The point is that a first draft too small for the job always costs you a second draft that takes serious effort. Writing rules for fourteen seats took this much. Now imagine redrafting the highest document for more than 330 million people, who disagree about nearly everything, including whether a dress was blue and black or white and gold.
A second draft is expensive. That is why we practiced on ourselves.
What we had to give up
A constitution that only restrains other people is just a memo. So the strict rules went on us first.
- No paid lobbyists and no political contributions. The law does not require this. We chose it, which is the whole idea.
- A pay cap. No one earns more than five times the lowest-paid employee, and after formation no one decides their own pay. This also removes the most awkward item from any budget meeting.
- Votes on camera. Everyone votes by raising a Voting Card. If the camera stops, the meeting stops. Deciding things privately by email or text is prohibited, so “let’s take this offline” is now a violation.
- Nobody carries a transaction from start to finish. Organizational money never rests in a personal account. No one gets to be the whole heist.
- AI advises and humans decide. No AI system holds a vote, a veto, or any authority. We like AI. We also like not being outvoted by it. Where formal review is required, independent systems form their own views before seeing each other’s, so real disagreement surfaces instead of a polite chorus.
A country asked to redraft itself would face the same hard part: holding the powerful to the rules before holding anyone else to them.
What we had to share
The big rebuild started with one question: what happens when the founder is not in the room? The answer is a lot of chairs.
- Eleven Pillar Directors, each with a Board seat and a department to lead. You don’t get the vote without the work. Each one gets a single word to live up to: Compass, Bridge, Historian, Steward, Sentinel, Ambassador, Teacher, Cultivator, Conscience, Architect, Engine.
- Three Independent Directors, who hold full votes and lead nothing. That is the point. Nobody can mark their own homework when the person grading it runs no department.
- One Member with deliberately narrow powers which focus on mission protection and continuity.
- An Independent Review Panel (IRP) of outsiders, for when a conflict stops an internal body from acting. No one reviews their own conduct, picks their own reviewer, or approves their own pay.
- A Constitutional Review Panel (CRP) that guards Constitution v2.0 and our Eternity Clauses, which are the promises at the heart of the mission, built to be very hard to change. Changing one takes the CRP and a unanimous vote. The CRP has fourteen Directors and fourteen outsiders. A constitution about the Constitution, if you will. Several of the outsiders have to have been out of every internal role for at least two years, so no one can pop in from the break room.
The people who write the rules, the people who settle disputes, and the people who guard the Constitution are not the same people. Separation of powers is not a new idea. We just had to apply it to ourselves before recommending it to anyone else.
For scale, 70 people were appointed to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, 55 attended, and 39 signed (National Archives). Our Constitutional Review Panel has 28 seats, about half the delegates and none of the powdered wigs. It also differs from the original in a few ways:
- Half of it is outsiders. The Convention was made up entirely of insiders. Ours is fourteen Directors and fourteen people who have to prove they are not.
- The doors stay open. The Framers met in secret. We record every formal meeting and publish the recording, minutes, and each individual vote within fourteen days.
- A higher bar. An amendment needs eleven yes votes from each half, and an Eternity Clause amendment needs unanimity. Fine, it is slower. That is a feature.
The Framers finished in a single summer. We have more people watching and more people with a veto, so please be patient.
What we had to accept
My favorite Article is the last one.
Article XXIV plans for the dissolution of ReDrafting America, and treats it as the goal. If the work succeeds and the Constitution is ratified, the Nonprofit lets go of it and becomes a museum, an archive, and a watchdog. When those have served their purpose, the doors close. Any remaining assets go only to other charities doing compatible work, never to an individual.
Most organizations spend their energy trying not to die. This one has a retirement plan. A rebirth that never lets go is not a rebirth. It is a landlord.
Success means no longer being needed. I think an institution that plans its own ending is one you can trust while it lasts.
What I learned
- First drafts fall short. That is their job. The country’s did. Ours did. A first draft that works perfectly is usually a first draft nobody tested.
- The flaw is usually the author. Ours was me, in every seat. The fix was to take myself out of the load-bearing parts.
- A second draft takes patience, and revising never ends. The Framers needed a summer and then 27 amendments. We needed 323 pages and an amendment process of our own.
- Templates, standards, and house rules save you a lot of headaches. Decide how things get written, formatted, and numbered once, and you stop re-deciding it on every page. In a document this size, consistency is not decoration. It is survival.
- Also: a Red Bull IV. Medically inadvisable. Spiritually required.
The rehearsal
323 pages does not make us right about everything. I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed otherwise, and 323 pages is a lot of surface area for being wrong.
What it does prove is narrower and more useful. We found the flaws in our own first draft. We fixed them in public. We wrote the fixes so they can outlast us. That is the only credential we are offering, and it is the one we should have to show before asking for yours.
The country’s turn is next. Constitution v2.0 is on its way, and we are excited to show it to you, a little more excited than is probably professional. In our words, its goals are to unify services, separate powers, eliminate duplication, preserve accountability, balance rights and responsibilities, and advance flourishing. When we ask you to read the next constitution, we want you to have already read ours.
TL;DR
The country’s first draft fell short. So did ours. We wrote a better second one, tore out the part where one person held every seat, and planned our own funeral. It took 323 pages and a lot of patience. Yes, we know.
Read it yourself
Both documents are public, and the Eternity Clauses that protect the mission are written to outlast me. Read them, challenge them, and tell us what we got wrong. the Articles of Incorporation · the Bylaws