The Oath
In 1992, I raised my right hand and swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I served fifteen years in the Air Force, Air Force Reserve, and Pennsylvania Air National Guard. The last five of those years were spent keeping military systems running. That oath never had an expiration date, and I've never treated it like it did.
Taking that oath seriously means more than defending the document. It means asking, honestly, whether it is still doing the job it was written to do.
A Comment, Not A Manifesto
The idea for ReDrafting America didn't start in a boardroom or a think tank. It started in a Facebook comment.
On June 6, 2017, I replied to a post by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. I agreed with much of what he was saying, but I felt the conversation stayed on the surface. The deeper problem wasn't Red versus Blue. It was the system itself. I pointed out that the Constitution's requirements for the presidency fit in a single sentence: be a natural-born citizen, be 35 years old, and have lived here 14 years. No other position of comparable responsibility would be filled that way. Near the end of that comment, I wrote one sentence that turned out to be the beginning of everything that followed:
"We need to write a new Constitution for the 21st century."
That comment was angry, unpolished, and written in a single sitting. It was a first draft in every sense. Some of its ideas would not survive scrutiny, and they shouldn't have. But many of them did. Qualification standards for public office, getting money out of politics, moving beyond the two-party system, equal law regardless of geography, a stronger separation between religion and government, and a government that rewards education and science are all, in refined form, part of Constitution v2.0 today.
An Engineer's Eye
I've spent thirty years in information technology, much of it rebuilding infrastructure for hospitals, banks, law firms, and manufacturers. Some of that work came after systems had been compromised. One lesson repeats in every rebuild: you can keep patching a system long after it has stopped serving the people who depend on it. Eventually, the responsible choice is to go back to the design, keep what has proven sound, and rebuild the rest.
That 2017 comment was the first time I looked at American government the way I look at infrastructure.
The Years Between
For seven years, the idea stayed with me while the system it was meant to address came under a kind of strain its framers never anticipated. A presidency tested the limits of executive power. In 2023, The Heritage Foundation published Mandate for Leadership, a detailed blueprint for reshaping the federal government around the executive branch. And by 2024, that same president was campaigning to return to office, a return the country would grant that November. Over those same years, campaigns to call the first-ever Article V convention gathered momentum in statehouse after statehouse, and I noticed that no one was preparing a fully reasoned proposal for delegates to consider. I explain why that matters in the Founder’s Introduction.
Whatever one's politics, those years exposed an uncomfortable truth. Many of the safeguards Americans assumed were written into law turned out to be customs, honored only as long as the people in power chose to honor them. In my field, a system that stays secure only as long as no one decides to exploit it has a name.
We call it vulnerable.
The last piece fell into place in 2024, though not the way I expected. I had spent three years helping a Fortune 100 company recover from a ransomware attack that crippled its operations, rebuilding its infrastructure site by site across the country. When that work was done, my position was eliminated. Losing that job gave this project the one resource it had always lacked: time. The idea I had carried since 2017 stopped being an idea, and I started building it.
The First Draft
ReDrafting America launched on July 4, 2024, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with one person, a laptop, and the same question from 2017: If we were designing this today, what would we build? Its first public words were the Founder’s Introduction, published that same day.
There was no staff, no funding, and no blueprint for starting a constitutional nonprofit. So I built it the way I've built everything else in my career: from the ground up, documented, and designed to outlast me. I wrote the Articles of Incorporation and the Bylaws, stood up the organization's infrastructure, built this website, and started drafting.
Why "Version 2.0"
The name Constitution v2.0 is an engineer's habit, and it's intentional. A version number makes a promise: this is not the final word. It will be reviewed, tested, corrected, and released again. The distance between that 2017 comment and today's framework is the best evidence of that promise. You'll see version numbers and change histories throughout this site for the same reason. We would rather show our work than ask for trust.
Where We Are Now
ReDrafting America is in its prelaunch and drafting stage. Our Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws are being finalized for submission in October 2026, and we expect our 501(c)(3) status to be finalized before the end of the year.
Constitution v2.0 is roughly half written, and we are committed to publishing it in the first quarter of 2027. Each Article will be released alongside an Explainer covering what the text means, why that direction was chosen, and the sources behind it.
We're also building ways to fund the work independently. The first is System Observatory, a macOS app that turns an idle Mac's screen into a live view of the machine's own inner workings. It includes a module introducing Constitution v2.0 to the public.
The Next Chapter
It took one comment to start this. It will take many voices to finish it. The founding drafts are being written now, and the people who help shape them will be part of this story from its first pages.
The future is ours to rewrite.
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