The United States Constitution is a remarkable and precious document. It was also written in 1787. Back when it was illegal to walk down the street with a chicken on your head.
The men who wrote it were trying to design a government for a country with fewer than four million people — that’s just twice the population of Manhattan. Where information traveled by horse, an “assault weapon” required you to stop and reload after every shot, and foreign interference in an election would have involved a guy getting off a boat carrying a suspiciously large sack of pamphlets.
Maybe it’s me, but the document that pretty much governs everything we do, more than 250 years later, could use an update.
Take treason, for example.
Article III declares that treason consists of “levying War” against the United States or “adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” It also establishes an extraordinarily high evidentiary bar for conviction.
There was a good reason for that. The Founders had watched European governments use accusations of treason as a convenient way of disposing of political opponents. They wanted the definition narrow so that presidents couldn’t simply announce that whoever annoyed them that morning was a traitor.
Excellent idea.
The problem is that the concept of an “enemy” developed around actual warfare. Historically, the constitutional meaning has been extraordinarily restrictive: hostility alone isn't enough. A foreign power can attack American interests, interfere in American democracy and conduct intelligence or cyber operations against us without necessarily becoming an “enemy” for purposes of the Treason Clause.
That creates a rather bizarre — and beyond exasperating — 21st-century problem.
According to the Mueller investigation, and everyone with an IQ over 5, Russia interfered extensively in the 2016 presidential election, and although the Mueller report did not establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, the president went out of his way every chance he got to repeatedly praise Vladimir Putin and cultivate an unusually warm relationship with him. A man who was considered public enemy number 1 by any standard.
At Helsinki in 2018, Trump publicly accepted Putin’s denial of Russian election interference over the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies, before later saying he had “misspoken.” The only time he ever backtracked.
In Trump 2.0, not only has the pattern not dissipated, it’s gotten more blatant.
Trump and Putin publicly displayed their warm relationship again at their 2025 Alaska summit, even though Putin offered no agreement to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
On Friday night, Trump took their bromance to new heights when he waived significant sanctions and tariffs aimed at Russia, a move Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and anyone with eyes, argued directly benefited Moscow.
None of this, by itself, establishes the constitutional crime of treason. But that's precisely the problem. It’s almost as if it took a corrupt, wannabe fascist like Donald Trump, and his Congressional MAGA sycophants, to highlight the myriad of issues with our ‘old-as-dirt’ governing document.
The Constitution asks us to look for eighteenth-century treason in a twenty-first-century world. A world where a president can actively aid and assist a nation that intentionally invaded an ally of the United States, the same nation that’s actively providing weapons to a terrorist state in order to assist in the killing of U.S. servicemen, that’s hard at work trying to sow chaos and division in our elections, again. Yet, according to our Constitution, none of this is technically treason.
Who are we kidding? At this point, it’s obvious: had Trump been president in 1941, he would’ve aligned the U.S. with Germany.
Foreign enemies no longer need to land soldiers on American beaches or attack our ports. They can hack computer systems. Manipulate social media. Steal government information. Finance influence operations. Attack infrastructure. Interfere with elections. Recruit Americans online. Launder propaganda through supposedly domestic sources.
And if Congress hasn't formally declared war?
Good luck fitting some of that into a constitutional provision written when George Washington was still trying to figure out whether America needed a national post office.
The same antiquated logic infects the Constitution's treatment of war itself.
Congress was given the power to declare war while the president became commander in chief. The idea was fairly obvious: no one person should be able to decide, all by himself, that thousands of Americans should go kill thousands of people somewhere else.
Yet America hasn't formally declared war since World War II. And for the better part of the past decade, we’ve seen more than our fair share of what any reasonable jury would no doubt call treason. Not just by the president. By his allies, as well. Willingness to treat the Constitution like toilet paper is practically a prerequisite for a job in the Trump administration.
Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. Somalia. Libya. And now, Iran. Decades of military operations, hundreds of thousands of American troops deployed and trillions of dollars spent — while “declaring war” has increasingly become something Congress apparently keeps around for historical reenactments.
If presidents can wage wars without declarations of war, but constitutional concepts such as treason remain tied to eighteenth-century understandings of who legally qualifies as an enemy, perhaps we've discovered a major design flaw.
And that's hardly the Constitution's only obsolete feature.
The Electoral College is an even stronger argument for action than the treason statute. After all, it’s the main reason we find ourselves where we are. A clause so backwards, it all but guarantees the minority will rule the majority. An anti-democratic principle if ever there was one.
Lifetime Supreme Court appointments is a close second. This obtuse, archaic provision means enormous questions affecting hundreds of millions of Americans can depend upon the political leanings of nine unelected people. Some of whom have recently proven to be as anti-democratic as any MAGA congressman.
And dare we talk about presidential pardons?
The Constitution currently provides presidents with enormous pardon power that can create obvious conflicts when political allies or participants in conduct benefiting the president are involved. Like, say, an insurrection.
Then there's impeachment — supposedly the ultimate protection against presidential abuse — which requires a two-thirds Senate vote for conviction.
In today's hyperpartisan America, you can’t get two-thirds of the Senate to agree on pizza toppings.
The answer isn't abandoning the Constitution.
It's taking the Constitution seriously enough to admit that the Founders weren't prophets by any stretch of the imagination.
They simply couldn't anticipate nuclear weapons, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, multinational corporations, social media, or a president colluding with an enemy of the United States in order to cling to power.
They built an extraordinary framework.
But a framework is not a finished building.
We have somehow transformed respect for the Constitution into worship of its permanence, as though acknowledging its shortcomings insults the people who wrote it. For goodness sakes, we treat a memo written 50 years ago as gospel as to why a sitting president can’t be indicted. Would it surprise you to know that memo was written by one of Richard Nixon’s closest allies? And, yet, we treat this coffee-stained, Post-It note sitting in some back office of some secretary, as law.
The Constitution itself contains an amendment process. The Founders literally included instructions for changing the thing.
They knew they weren't infallible. The problem is getting those in power who benefit from the chaos, the instability, the electoral college, the lack of criminal penalties for betraying your oath of office, the all-but-meaningless ‘guidelines’ and ‘norms,’ to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. There’s about as much of a chance of that happening as there is the Trump administration finding a competent press secretary.
The Constitution was revolutionary during the revolution.
Unless we take a serious look at reforming this seriously fallible document, changing it may require another one.