What to keep at all costs:
- Primacy of individual freedom
- Limited central government with enumerated powers
- Federalism
- Separation of powers
- Enumerated rights – speech, religion, press, self-defense, legal due process and property rights*
- Rights enumeration does not disparage other natural rights
- Difficult but not impossible to amend
What to fix:
- Constitutional review that doesn’t sidestep the amendment process
- Clearly delineate the local/state/federal power structure
- Make some structural attempt to rein in the bureaucracy
- Enshrine “original public meaning” in the document itself
- Clean up the electoral college description in the document itself to encourage electoral integrity
Postscript: after writing this category, this post was published by Victor Davis Hanson discussing some similar ideas. I strongly suggest reading the whole thing.
*In this category, I intentionally didn’t spend too much time on these. It truly appears to me that all of these are so fundamental and clear as to not need defending and explicating. Recent events, though, seem to imply that not everyone understands the fundamental importance of these rights in a free society, so I may have to rethink this omission.