Most view the U.S. Constitution as a sacred document carved in stone by divine hands. Every Sept. 17, we celebrate its anniversary. Millions of people, including elected officials, military personnel, and newly naturalized citizens, take an oath to uphold it. There’s even a well-known book about its creation titled “ Miracle at Philadelphia .”

In reality, the Constitution was drafted by 55 affluent white men, many of whom were slave owners. It contains several questionable compromises that only came about to prevent the 1787 Convention in Philadelphia from collapsing. For instance, to address the issue of counting enslaved people for congressional representation, the original document counted each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person.

Our 237-year-old document requires urgent reform. It includes several antiquated elements — most of which happen to benefit the modern Republican Party. Each constitutional article establishing one of our three branches of government contains at least one major issue.

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Article One includes the “Great Compromise,” which established a bicameral Congress to resolve the conflict over representation between large and small states. While trumpeted as a nation-saver, it also established a Senate in which every state is represented by two senators regardless of population. This has resulted in massive imbalances, including the Republicans being disproportionately represented in this powerful body today.

Consider the stark contrast between Wyoming and California, our least- and most-populous states. Each senator from the predominantly Republican state of Wyoming represents approximately 292,000 people, while each senator from California, recently more Democratic, has over 19.5 million constituents. Shouldn’t every American be represented equally?

Article Two of the Constitution, which established the Executive Branch, includes the vastly undemocratic Electoral College. This system was initially created because the founders didn’t trust “We the People” to elect the president directly. However, in 48 states, all electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who wins the majority in that state, regardless of how close the vote is. As a result, five presidents have been elected without winning a majority of the nationwide popular vote. The two most recent were Republicans George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.

Then, there’s Article Three, which established our federal judicial system. By happenstance, Trump recently appointed three Supreme Court justices, one-third of the current court. These three are currently 52, 57, and 59 years old. Since the Constitution permits them to serve for life, they will continue issuing decisions aligned with the MAGA/Republican philosophy long after Trump has faded from the political scene.

Federalism is another outdated principle embedded in our Constitution. It is how political powers are divided between the federal government and the states. How does it work? According to the 10th Amendment, any power not explicitly granted to the federal government in Article One, Section Eight, is “reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Giving states more power may have made sense at that time, as they had recently won their independence and did not want to replace the dominating mother country they had just overthrown with a strong federal government. However, in today’s world — characterized by cell phones, jet travel, and the Internet — most people tend to identify more as Americans than Virginians or New Yorkers.

Federalism benefits the modern GOP because it allows the more conservative states to maintain control over issues like education, abortion, and healthcare — matters not explicitly designated as federal powers in the Constitution. This enables them to censor books in school libraries, restrict women’s rights over their bodies, and manage the allocation of Medicaid funds for disadvantaged individuals.

Recently, Trump has been threatening to use another outdated provision in the Constitution, the recess-appointment clause. He has hinted at employing this rarely used passage, which empowers a president to make a necessary appointment when Congress is out of session, to acquire approval for his highly questionable cabinet nominees without Senate confirmation. If successful, this move would further undermine an already vulnerable democracy, but with backing from his Supreme Court appointees, he might just prevail.

So, what’s the solution? In the short term, we face an impasse because the founders intentionally made it difficult to amend the Constitution. And given the current political climate, the GOP would prefer to maintain the status quo.

However, the Constitution also includes a clause allowing two-thirds of state legislatures — 34 in total — to request Congress to convene a national convention for proposing new amendments. If this were to happen, it could provide an opportunity to modernize our foundational document.

The original purpose of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was to address the shortcomings of the Articles of Confederation, a document that had been written only a decade earlier. Why not consider taking a similar approach 237 years later?

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