Going through the transcripts isn’t quite as time-consuming as I thought. You can pretty much skip the first half of a session and just do an extended one after the lunch break. By the time dinner rolls around, you’re done.
A lot of the things getting talked about were pretty predictable. For the most part, despite my request, people focused on their pet agendas. The White session offered up the biggest cheer: when Wanda Hardcourt said that it needed to be made clear that corporations didn’t have the rights of people.
Curiously, from the debate that followed, came the suggestion of an Article that was a sense of the Convention: statements of intent of significant items (e.g. corporate personhood) that had judicial standing — not laws in and of themselves, but the explicit intent of the authors so that decisions might find consistency over time. I don’t think it will survive to the final draft, but it’s an interesting notion.
While the Red sessions were focused a lot on business protections, a degree of isolationism, firearm protections, and religious protections, there were also quite a number of debates strongly favoring those in the other two groups: term limits, free speech, etc. The flavor was different, but that can certainly be worked out in the text.
The major difference with the Red sessions were the smattering of remarks about this being a waste of time since we were going to divide, anyway.
I talked about the talk of splitting with other very informally. While there is a sense of the Reds not just leaning in that direction but preferring it, it’s not like the sentiment isn’t shared among several of the Blues and Whites as well. While a lot of reasons are tossed about, a frequent one is fatigue over having to constantly find compromise between people and groups with profoundly different ideas of what serves as a model for a good life. A lot of good will has been spent over the past several decades.
And yet, especially after going through the Red sessions, I don’t think we are necessarily as opposed as you’d think. Maybe it’s because we have so many “regular folk” in our mix and not parts of “the machine”, but there is a fair amount of common ground.
Even so…not a few people have talked about the nation that existed when the Constitution was ratified vs the country we have now. Hundreds of millions more people, vast tracts of lands as states that couldn’t have been imagined, and (more importantly) more than two centuries of experience instead of a theoretical “great experiment”. Basically: the Constitution hasn’t scaled well and didn’t have the tools to reign in some of our less attractive tendencies. To be fair: they started with legal slavery…so hardly the most righteous of foundations.
So…tomorrow is a day off. I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure it’ll be a busman’s holiday, but I’ll take what I can get at this point.
