My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
This wasn't "suposed" to be an issue because the federal government was only really supposed to meddle in things that were obviously common issues or flagrantly interstate.
But now that it's in the business of taking everyone's money via income tax and then dolling it back out to the state to spend with strings attached (which is basically how the bulk of the non-entitlements, non-military money gets spent) the minutia of federal regulation matters far more.
The problem is too much centralization of power in the federal government, when the entire purpose of the constitution was supposed to be to LIMIT the power of the federal government so that states could mostly govern themselves.
California should make it's own laws, Montana should make it's own laws - and the federal government should set out the rules on how they talk to each-other.
States Rights are supposed to be the protection against political-party and legislator capture at the federal level.
There were already 25 states (50 Senators) by the time James Madison died in 1836. The original Constitution framers had already seen the explosive growth of the US during their lifetimes. So I can't imagine they didn't envision it.
They might have envisioned it during their lifetimes, but I don't see how you can argue that things that happened after the Constitution/BoR were written informed their decisions while writing it.
So maybe we're saying that the Founding Fathers were, in fact, not visionaries. Maybe they only had the same myopic 10-20 year view that anyone else today does.
I think there is very little our founding fathers would recognize about today's american government, in a wide variety of ways.
Jefferson was probably the least myopic among them, in at least recognizing that all humans are myopic and struggle to have any concept of what the future holds.
Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.
Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.