Constitutional Governance
USA - we are a country forged by a war for independence, as many are. Our founding fathers reached a consensus on a document from which would emerge a stable order, the rule of law, and the form the ideological basis for governing ourselves.
"We the people" grant these rights and powers to a legislative body as described in article 1, and we grant these article 2 powers to our elected president, and we give these other powers in article 3 to the judiciary. We the people are the authors of our constitution, from which our government emerges.
First there were Articles of Confederation, basically a military alliance, with a feckless central body that couldn't even settle disputes between states. When our founding fathers undertook the process of writing a governing document - the constitution, they never had the notion that whatever they signed onto was written in stone. Guess what Nikki Haley? Everyone knew that slavery would need to be addressed.
Slavery was a problem from day one and rightfully so, moral abomination that it is. But conservative white men in southern states, who were amassing wealth using slave labor, insisted on compromises to any governing document they would agree to. This is how we got stuck with our shitty electoral college, which is an anti-democratic concession to slave states who insisted that for political apportionment purposes slaves be counted despite not having voting rights. The compromise ended up being to count slaves as 3/5 of a person, in spite of the fact that those states gaining political power were not representing their best interests.
Another problem that resulted in a debilitating tradeoff was protecting small states from big populous states like Virginia, who might use the power of the federal government to impose their will on smaller states. Hence the US Senate, where Delaware got the same number of Senators as Virginia which had more than 10x the population.
Fast forward and we see today Montana has the same 2 Senators as California, with about 80x the people. The compromise they made to protect smaller states was to remove the possibility of this being changed by amendment, so only if all 50 states agree can the Senate composition be changed.
It was obvious from jump street that we needed a constitutional amendment process to deal with unresolved and unforeseen problems. At first there were hundreds of amendments being floated, it was overwhelming. The result was abandoning the process initially, and ratifying first then mass amending a group collectively called the bill of rights.
The process worked back then. Post civil war, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were used to abolish slavery, ensure the right to citizenship for those who came here involuntarily, and the right to vote for all men.
It became more difficult to amend over time however. In the 1960s a progressive USA passed amendments, most notably lowering the voting age to 18 in the wake of the Vietnam war.
Now we find ourselves in a situation where we cannot, for all practical purposes, amend it further. It requires 2/3 vote of both houses of congress and needs to be ratified by 3/4 of the states - a consensus we're unlikely to get.
SCOTUS ends up being the de facto constitutional managers through their interpretations of the document, and end up ceding power to the executive branch - exactly what the founding fathers intended to avoid!
We need to address the problem of SCOTUS not serving it's intended role as arbiter of differences between judicial circuits, hearer of last resort for criminal cases, etc. We the people need to have the exclusive power to decide what our governing document means, and change it as needed.
We cannot have a new constitution without a revolution, since we have no consensus to convene a constitutional convention. It's also true that we cannot make necessary structural changes to codify democratic ideals without amending the constitution, and even then we cannot deal with some issues like how the US Senate enables a minority of the country to hold the majority hostage on matters like approving supreme court justices, cabinet secretaries, etc.
Our constitution was a first, but is it flexible enough to deal with modern situations? Do we need a more modern constitution? How would that even be possible without civil war? If only I had as many answers as questions.