Two legal scholars debate whether we should have a new constitutional convention and start from scratch. University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson says yes, noting that Thomas Jefferson himself warned against treating the Constitution as "too sacred to be touched." But I'm more persuaded by the arguments of New York University law professsor Richard Epstein, who says a convention would introduce a degree of uncertainty that would make matters worse rather than better:
It is not because I think that the current state of affairs is ideal, when manifestly it is not. It is rather that I think that any revision of the document will move us dangerously along a path of greater and more powerful government at the national and state levels that will only make matters worse....
The founders tried their best to create a system giving the federal government the power it needed but lacked under the Articles of Confederation, and only that much power. But almost every safeguard they put in to limit federal power has been superseded or ignored. And how many people could we round up who would be the intellectual equals of the founders? It's scary to imagine what a convention today might come up with.
