Sestercentennial
Constitutional Updates
Claire Westbrook had spent thirty-seven years as a librarian, and in all that time, she had never seen a document so badly in need of her attention.
The Constitution of the United States lay before her on the oak desk, its yellowed pages protected by acid-free sleeves. Her laptop hummed quietly to her left. In her right hand, she held a red pen, though she suspected she would need several more before the day was done.
“Let’s start with the obvious,” she murmured, opening a fresh document on her screen.
The first problem was version control. Claire had managed the transition of three separate library systems from card catalogs to digital databases. She understood versioning. The Constitution, however, read like a manuscript edited by a committee of ghosts, each one unaware of what the others had written. The Eighteenth Amendment established Prohibition, the Twenty-First repealed it. But both remained in the text, like a conversation frozen mid-argument.
She began typing. Amendment XVIII: [SUPERSEDED - See Amendment XXI] appeared in clean red text. Then she moved to Article I, Section 2, where the three-fifths clause still lurked like an unflushed toilet in an otherwise presentable house.
“Deprecated,” she said firmly, striking through the passage. “Deprecated, deprecated, deprecated.”
By noon, she had excised the dead code from the document’s body. The Constitution now read as it actually functioned, not as it had accumulated. Claire permitted herself a small smile. This was merely the foundation.
The afternoon brought the harder work.
Thomas Jefferson had believed each generation should write its own constitution. Claire found this impractical but sympathized with the underlying concern. Documents calcified. Interpretations drifted. She added Article VIII: Periodic Review, establishing a nonpartisan committee to convene every twenty years, tasked not with rewriting but with annotating, with asking whether the words still meant what they had meant, whether the silences still served.
“You would have liked this part,” she told Jefferson, though of course he was not there to hear it.
The hyperlinks came next. The Founders had not invented their ideas from nothing; they had borrowed and adapted, argued with Locke and Montesquieu in the margins of their own minds. Claire made those debts visible. The Magna Carta appeared as a reference beside the due process clause. The English Bill of Rights floated near the Second Amendment. She linked to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, to the Iroquois Great Law of Peace, to documents the Founders had read and documents they should have read.
Then the footnotes. District of Columbia v. Heller attached itself to the Second Amendment like a barnacle, along with United States v. Miller and the dissents that had lost but still mattered. Brown v. Board of Education nestled beside the Equal Protection Clause. Marbury v. Madison received pride of place at Article III, the case that had given the Court its teeth.
The glossary proved the most delicate work. “Well-regulated militia” received a historical definition, an evolving definition, and a note acknowledging that reasonable people disagreed about which one controlled. “Person subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” got three full paragraphs and a flowchart.
By evening, Claire had reached the final task.
She stared at the blinking cursor at the top of the document. The TL;DR. The summary. The thing no one had ever dared to write because summarizing the Constitution felt somehow sacrilegious, like writing CliffsNotes for the Bible.
Claire had written CliffsNotes for the Bible. It had been a slow week in 1994.
She began to type:
TL;DR: This is the rulebook we wrote to keep ourselves from wrecking the place. It sets up a government, limits its power, and insists that people matter. It has been patched 27 times. It is old, imperfect, amendable, and binding until we say otherwise, together.
Claire read it twice. She added a period. She removed the period. She added it again.
“Good enough,” she decided.
The email composed itself almost automatically. To: president@whitehouse.gov. CC: the Chief Justice, the parliamentarians of both chambers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Subject: Constitutional Update v2.0 - Please Review.
Her finger hovered over the send button.
Then, on a whim, she opened the BCC field.
The mailing list was a side projected that had taken her six months to compile. Every registered voter. Every taxpayer. Every person with a Social Security number and an email address on file. Three hundred and forty two million Americans, give or take.
Claire added them all.
She clicked send.