Founder’s Introduction: Better Institutions, Not Better Rulers

For most of my life, I believed the United States Constitution was largely self-correcting. It wasn’t perfect, but I trusted it. Like many Americans, I believed our institutions were strong enough to withstand almost any political challenge and that, however bitter our disagreements became, the system itself would endure.

The events of the past decade caused me to question that faith. Regardless of one’s political views, those years demonstrated how much our constitutional system depends upon unwritten norms, individual restraint, and public trust. What troubled me most was not any single election, leader, party, or movement. It was the realization that institutions I had trusted all my life might be more fragile than I had ever imagined.

That realization led me to ask a different question: not “How do we elect better people?” but “How do we design better institutions?” The answer became ReDrafting America. (How the project began is told in Our Story.)

It seems fitting to share that answer today, on the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The founders did not believe their work was finished, and neither should we.

The Institutional Weakness

Many of our institutions still function remarkably well, but too many depend upon tradition rather than constitutional requirement. They assume future leaders will exercise restraint, that political actors will place the public interest above personal gain, and that unwritten norms will be respected simply because they always have been.

Consider the highest office in the land. To become President of the United States, the Constitution requires only three things: that you are a natural-born citizen, that you are at least 35 years old, and that you have lived in the country for 14 years. No experience, no demonstrated understanding of the Constitution, no review of conflicts of interest. Almost no other position of comparable responsibility, public or private, is filled with so few safeguards. Whatever has kept the office in capable hands, it has been custom and the judgment of voters, not the design of the system.

Those assumptions may once have been sufficient. I no longer believe they are. I also refuse to believe the fragility is permanent.

Honoring the Constitution does not require us to ignore its vulnerabilities. Sometimes the most faithful way to preserve an inheritance is to strengthen it before passing it on.

Why Leadership Isn’t Enough

Throughout history, societies have often responded to political crises by searching for better leaders. Leadership certainly matters, but I have come to believe that lasting stability depends even more upon institutional design.

As an infrastructure engineer, I’ve learned that resilient systems cannot depend on every component performing perfectly. They must be designed to withstand failure. Constitutional government should be no different. Well-designed institutions help ordinary leaders succeed and limit the damage caused by extraordinary failures. Poorly designed institutions eventually fail, regardless of who occupies office.

Elections can change the people. Constitutional reform can improve the system itself.

That belief lies at the heart of ReDrafting America.

Article V and the Convention No One Is Ready For

The framers anticipated this moment. Article V gives the American people two ways to change their Constitution: Congress may propose amendments, or, when two-thirds of the state legislatures apply, Congress “shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments.” In more than two centuries, that second door has never been opened.

It may not stay closed. For years, organized campaigns have been persuading state legislatures to apply for a convention. One effort, seeking a balanced budget amendment, has passed applications in more than half the states. Another, seeking broader limits on federal power, has passed them in nearly twenty. Some advocates argue that, counted together with older applications, the two-thirds threshold has already been met.

Whatever one thinks of those campaigns, one fact troubles me more than any of them: if a convention were called tomorrow, no one would arrive with a complete, publicly tested proposal for a better constitutional system. Delegates would face the most consequential deliberation in American history with nothing in front of them but competing slogans.

That is what ReDrafting America intends to change. Constitution v2.0 is meant to be ready before it is needed: a fully reasoned proposal, every provision explained and open to public scrutiny, available to whatever lawful body the American people empower to consider it.

I want to be precise about what that means. ReDrafting America does not claim the authority to enact anything. Writing a proposal requires no one’s permission; adopting one requires the consent of the American people through their lawful institutions. A convention, if one is ever called, must remain free to debate, revise, or reject anything we offer. And any path to adoption must preserve an unbroken chain of lawful authority, so that the Constitution we have remains fully in force unless and until a successor is lawfully ratified.

The founders themselves disagreed about how often a nation should revisit its fundamental law. Thomas Jefferson argued that the earth belongs to the living and that no generation should permanently bind the next. James Madison warned that a constitution must be stable enough to govern, even as it remains capable of correcting its defects. George Washington urged that any change come “by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates.” I believe all three were right, and Constitution v2.0 is an attempt to honor them together: to renew our fundamental law peacefully, lawfully, and only with the consent of the governed.

Constitution v2.0 Is Not the Final Word

The work ahead is a proposed framework I call Constitution v2.0. It is still taking shape. It will not be presented as a perfect document or a finished solution, but as a starting point: a comprehensive proposal meant to provoke serious discussion about what constitutional government should look like in the twenty-first century.

Our ambition for it is unapologetically high. We intend Constitution v2.0 to become the world’s greatest constitution: a founding document for the country we actually live in, clear enough that a citizen with no legal training can read it, honest about hard things, and built to last. It must serve the American people first, and in time we hope it will become a model for other nations writing or revising their own. Universal human rights will be its floor, not its ceiling.

That is a title it must earn and can never declare. No constitution becomes great because its authors say so. It becomes great only by surviving the scrutiny of people with every reason to find its flaws, and by improving each time they do. That is why I can hold so ambitious a goal and still insist this work is not the final word. The two ideas are not in tension. The only way to build the world’s greatest constitution is to invite everyone to try to make it better.

Among the questions it will explore are whether candidates for high office should meet baseline standards of competence and ethics, whether independent institutions should be responsible for oversight and civic education, and how a modern republic can use technology without surrendering liberty to it.

Every article, every institution, and every safeguard should be questioned, debated, tested, and improved. If better ideas emerge, they should replace my own. The objective has never been to preserve my work unchanged. It has always been to build the strongest constitutional framework possible.

To help accomplish that, ReDrafting America plans a Digital Constitutional Convention: a place where citizens can debate, refine, and improve these ideas in the same spirit of deliberation that shaped our nation’s founding. It will open after the first Articles and their plain-language Explainers have been published, so that the conversation begins with something concrete to examine.

The Favor of Your Company Is Requested

In eighteenth-century correspondence, this phrase was simply another way of saying, “You’re invited.” I can think of no more appropriate way to conclude this introduction.

I invite you to help continue a conversation that began in Philadelphia nearly two and a half centuries ago. I ask only that you approach it with an open mind and a willingness to engage honestly with the ideas presented here.

You do not need to agree with every proposal. In fact, I hope you won’t. Constructive disagreement, supported by evidence and thoughtful reasoning, is one of the most valuable contributions anyone can make.

Despite everything that has caused me concern, I remain hopeful. I still believe in the capacity of the American people to reason together, to disagree without becoming enemies, and to build something better than any one of us could design alone. I believe we can create institutions worthy of those who came before us, and strong enough to protect generations we will never meet.

If you’d like to follow the work as it develops, start with the other papers in The Drafting Room, follow ReDrafting America on the channel you use most, or write to us directly. Every serious idea is welcome.

Founder & President

ReDrafting America

Veritas Super Omnia — “The Truth Above All Else.”