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usa-constitution's Introduction

Historical Edits of the USA Constitution

The United States of America's Constitution has seen many modifications over the centuries. These changes have been handled without modification of the original document through what is called an Amendment. But what does the final document look like? How did these Amendments actually change what that document said? This repository answers those questions, to the best of my ability.

Gitmoji is utilized to signal the type of change being made. As these are create for software and not legal documents, some imagination may be needed. https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/

Who Made the Change?

I tried my best to identify a primary author of the Amendment utilizing that person as the Author of the commit. I also used the ability to change the commit date... which was not have been the best choice. Git dates are incapable of representing the year in which these events took place; in this case the 1970's could be represented so I decided to ignore the first two digits.

With the exception of the commits made in 1971, the year was actually 1791, I did this:

1983 - Drop the 19 and add 1000 => 183x

Thus We don't have a specific year and it is confusing.

Going forward though, any amendments should use the actual amended date since there will be no confusion for this scheme and anything occurring after 2000.

The Eighteenth Amendment

I would draw attention to Amendment XVIII.

https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution/commit/6ab65486ff0c542a24d0d8c1f38f7d0cf15d7490

This was the only amendment to the Constitution which deserved the addition of a new Article. All other modifications had a reasonable Article they either modified or expanded on. The 18th Amendment however was the prohibition of alcohol, the only amendment to directly affect what people could do within their state. All other content in the Constitution covers how the government is put together, what role each segregation plays and even puts restrictions on what States can do.

I had considered adding additional content to this commit that wasn't found in the Amendment. Why? Because I wanted to clearly state that the government was granting themselves the power necessary to enforce this. But at last I did not, because Article I Section 8 ends with

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Which looking at again, does not say they have the power to lay laws to enforce the Articles of the Constitution, but instead the Powers vested by this Constitution... Hmmm, I expressly removed the portion of the Amendments which actually granted power to enforce the Amendment (as still visible in the amendments.md file).

Makes you wonder if this was what was needed to ban alcohol, where does the government get the power to ban drugs.

Additional Contributions

Since the historic modifications are complete, additional markdown formatting is welcome.

While the master branch shall remain the actual edits to the Constitution, feel free to propose a new branch that include changes you'd like to express. I'll arbitrarily evaluate if it is suitable to be added. One idea might be to change the Constitution to clearly state the powers the government is executing with.

Keep in mind this is not a formal platform to establish Constitutional changes.

Rewrite

This repository is a retroactively completed depiction of history, thus git's history has needed to be corrected due to the failures to get some messages correct. For this reason the git history is being rewritten.

As such, rewrites will have their original work preserved on a branch as attempt-#

Attempt-2 - Issue-20 Article I is duplicated caused by https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution/commit/1e6aa0520e8d7d82c581b0f9aab16d6ebf03638f

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usa-constitution's Issues

Potentially overly centralized, but interesting.

Regarding "We the People" 0ab6fd6 - great effort, genuinely lovely idea.

I would suggest that these entities "Senate" and "House of Representatives" seem to have extraordinarily elevated permissions. I understand you intend them to marshall resources, allocate permissions on behalf of "The People" but what's to stop a runaway condition, an accumulation of power? This is essentially a classical centralized heirarchy.

Your intention to create a "more perfect Union" is noble, but what's to guarentee "The People" will ultimately retain any form of representation in this structure? A reasonably well organized attack on any of the principal nodes (or inter-process comms) would result in the entire system being overwhelmed and overrun by malicious actors (with or without local permissions). "The People" would become subserviant to this system - IMHO it's just not going to remain distributed in the way you are intending.

Time will tell. Not convinced, perhaps you need to decentralize more. gl hf!

Restore network

Restore network and make sure there are no restrictions on anything. I want to be able to flow freely through apps

Article 1 Section 8 is missing

Thanks for your work putting this together. Perhaps more of a question, but I don't see Article. I. Section. 8. in Constitution.md. It's an important section that enumerates the powers of the Federal government. It can be found on archives.org and congress.gov to name a few. Other sections seem to be missing content as well; for example Article. I. Section. 7. is missing Clause 3. Am I misreading something or Is this somehow connected? Cheers

Confusing explanation of commit dates

I've now read this explanation several times:

With the exception of the commits made in 1971, the year was actually 1791, I follow the simple path of ignoring the least significant digit. So 1996 means 196?as I chop off the 19, the year 1000 is implied and then tack on the next two significant digits of the year which is 96 and leaves off the specific year.

…but I am still no closer to understanding the date mapping than I was to begin with. Maybe a mathematical formula or list of examples might help?

security flaw

commit 8f9ef40 contains a security flaw that can / will lead to rooting and runaway resource consumption; please revert

Guns are no longer the answer in the face of a liberty-denying oppressor.

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

  • A militia is no longer needed in order to ensure that the American experiment of democracy makes it to fruition.
  • Modern weaponry is ridiculously OP in comparison to the muskets present at the time of original post. https://youtu.be/g62m7yOhgRY?t=33
  • The mentally ill townsfolk and brigands keep killing lots of other townsfolk.

If you read the biographies about the people that wrote this document, they almost looked at it as a temporary means to get the nation started in the right direction, and they intentionally made it ready to evolve to suit the needs of the people. To put things in perspective, they were redoing the Articles of Confederation that were only finished in 1781.

Frankly, I think they would be appalled in our lack of democratic participation if they found out that we are not keeping it up to date.

Perhaps the solution is two-fold:

  1. The people have the right to use appropriate weapons to hunt and protect themselves.
  2. Revise the "right to assemble" in order to allow people to self-organize to resist oppressors.

Timestamps

Is it possible to make the git timestamps within each commit be the correct year from the 1700s/1800s/etc? Or is this a limitation with pre 1960/unix epoch dates?

Amendments should not appear in main body of Constitution.md

I noticed that many of the amendment commits add text to the main body of Constitution.md in addition to adding a file for each amendment (eg: the commit for Amendment XXI includes both a new file with the amendment, amendments/00021.md, and also an edit to Constitution.md). However, the edit to the main body of Constitution.md is not real and should not be included.

As I looked into this further, I noticed that many amendments were erroneously scattered throughout the main text of Constitution.md in seemingly random (and incorrect) places. Here are some more examples I found in a quick skim:

  • The text of Amendment I is included in Article I Section 1 of Constitution.md (see line 15) but it should not be (see true US Constitution text for Article I Section 1)
    • This change appears to have occurred during the Bill of Rights commit, prior to this the text was accurate
  • The text of Amendment III is included in Article II Section 2 of Constitution.md (see line 496) but it should not be (see true US Constitution text for Article II Section 2)
    • This change appears to have occurred during the Bill of Rights commit, prior to this the text was accurate
  • The text of Amendments IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII appear in Article III Section 4 of Constitution.md but in reality there is no Article III Section 4 of the US Constitution (see link to the top of Article III)
    • This change appears to have occurred during the Bill of Rights commit, prior to this the text was accurate
  • A portion of the text of Amendment XVIII is included in Article VIII of Constitution.md (see line 724) but in reality there is no Article VIII of the US Constitution (see link to Article VII, which is the last article before amendments)
  • I also observed some major textual discrepancies between the Constitution.md Article I Sections 1 and 2 and the true version. It looks to me like there may have been some git rebase/squash/force related issues, because early commits of these repo have the correct text, but later commits (this one, for example) seem to alter the text in unexpected ways

I consulted the following three sources for the text of the US Constitution and they all agree that the examples I provide above are erroneous.

There may be more errors; I didn't dig too deeply into this. If you like, I'm happy to clone the repo and open a pull request with all the errors I could find, although I didn't want to just randomly open a PR on your repo without hearing from you first. Let me know, and thank you for putting so much work into this. It's a very cool project!

Create Code

Translating this set of rules written in English to executable code is challenging, but should be undertaken.
Any motivation around to design an automated law system?
Thanks

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