As we reflected on the 235th anniversary of the framers’ decision to finalize our Constitution and send it out to the states for ratification — Constitution Day was this past weekend — I was finalizing the latest step in another constitution drafting project. For several years now, I’ve been a part of the National Constitution Center’s convening of three teams of experts, labeled progressive, conservative, and libertarian, to make whatever changes to our founding document we felt necessary or to scrap the whole thing and start over.

I was the captain of Team Liberty, as we called ourselves, alongside Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute and Christina Mulligan of Brooklyn Law School. We thought our job was easiest because all we really needed to do was add “and we mean it” to every existing provision and call it a day.