Second, the corporatism of our government puts profits, (including those of the healthcare industry), above all – including our human rights, and this was not able to be addressed in our Constitution.

Shouldn't we say the same about food then and discontinue food stamps, wellfare and everything else? What does that say about society that we're unwilling, not unable, to help those in our country when they need it the most?

The notion that we have human rights is a myth. The concept emerged from “natural law” in the seventeenth century and became the imprimatur for the “social contract,” which, in turn, begat consideration of Natural Rights, and then Unalienable Rights, and then Human Rights, among other designations. This new worldview was the Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment philosophers – John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, and others – and led to the almost universal conclusion (the exception being Thomas Hobbes) that power should flow from the people, not from the governing authority. But, the intervening 200 years have shown that human rights cannot stand alone. Consider all the wars, the concentration camps, the gulags, slavery, torture, etc., etc.

We respect the US founders for their huge leap in the concept of government. For the first time, government was seen as being a necessary evil and the Constitution was a document which, instead of listing all the things people had to do, or could not do, it explicitly stated the powers of the government and (more importantly) the restrictions on its power.

This limitation of power and the freedom it gave to the people created the environment in which the progress beyond "wooden teeth, candle-light, leeches and slavery" was made.

We "rugged individualists" don't want a free ride where we don't have to pay for anything. We understand and expect to have to pay for the things that we get. However, we also want government to stay out of our way and stop taking the fruits of our labor for their pet projects.

It's not the "yellowed copy of the Constitution" that we regard so highly. It's the liberty it enshrines. And that liberty is as important, if not more so, today as it was in 1790.

As far as the jury, it was setup to be the determiner of unlawful action so that people couldn't be judged by representatives of the government itself.

I've said for a long time, making more regulations about lobbying won't do reduce the practice. Only by eliminating the power to grant the favors that those lobbyists are seeking will get rid of them.

To me, the first baby steps in that direction is to increase the transparency of government. Passing bills that make Congress:

– vote on one topic at a time
– read the bills they vote to enact (signed affidavit)
– write all criminally punishable laws (no more incriminating regulations by FCC, FDA, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc, etc)
– post the final version of the bills longer (28 days for non-emergencies, 7 days for emergencies)
– name the clause in the Constitution which grants Congress the authority to do whatever they are trying to pass

I believe that by pushing these simple transparency policies, we can begin to reassert the authority of the Constitution and reclaim the federalism of the Federal government.