Last updated around 26/1/31 17:30
Preamble to the Preamble
This draft is written in pencil, not ink. It is malleable, adjustable, erasable, and, most importantly, actually exists. Do not, do not, and do not treat it like gospel. Subject it to the full force of your intelligence and offer your own authentic, unique perspective. This draft is roughly 30,000 words, which is far longer than our current Constitution, but well within the range of modern Constitutions. Take it one Article at a time. Take breaks. The language is dry and difficult to read, as befits a legal document, and the philosophical and political questions it grapples with are nuanced and complex, debated and contested in classrooms and courtrooms around the world. Yet this is our task, the one on which our Republic depends, the one openly inviting your contribution. You do not need to be a constitutional law professor, a career lawyer, or a partisan politician to contribute. You only need to pick up your own pencil and get to work.
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt