Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHA New Constitution for New Hampshire. Another for the United States. Here Is How It Can Legally Be Done.
The documents that govern us were written for a world of quill pens and candlelight, and the machinery for changing them has nearly rusted shut. So I wrote two replacements, one for this state and one for the country, and traced the lawful road to each. The road is real. New Hampshire’s begins with a question already printed on the 2032 ballot.
Full disclosure: both proposed constitutions discussed and offered for download in this piece are my own drafts, written as works of public argument. They are not law, not filings, and not bills before any legislature. Every factual claim about the current constitutions, the courts, and the data is verified in the fact-check table below.
There is a number that should end every lazy sermon about the permanence of constitutions, and it is nineteen. In September 1789, writing to James Madison from Paris, Thomas Jefferson worked out from mortality tables that a political generation turns over about every nineteen years, and argued that no constitution should outlive the generation that consented to it. “The earth belongs always to the living generation,” he wrote. Madison talked him down, and the country has been living inside Madison’s caution ever since. Then, two centuries later, three scholars measured every national constitution written on earth between 1789 and 2005, all 935 of them, and found the average lifespan of a constitution is nineteen years. Jefferson did not offer an opinion. He performed a calculation, and the data of two hundred years returned his exact number.
The same number twice. Jefferson’s 1789 calculation and the measured average from Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton’s study of 935 constitutions. Graphic: GSR.
The United States Constitution has governed for 237 years and counting, the oldest written national constitution still operating anywhere. New Hampshire’s is five years older than that. This essay is not a complaint about either document’s age. It is a delivery, timed to the nation’s two hundred fiftieth year and sent from the state that adopted America’s first constitution six months before there was a Declaration to sign. Below are two complete proposed constitutions, free to download: a revision of New Hampshire’s, built to be taken up article by article at the convention this state’s own constitution invites in 2032, and a renewal of the federal charter, twelve articles, built on Jefferson’s principle and designed to survive Madison’s objection. With them comes the argument, and the legal machinery by which each could lawfully become real. Not a coup, not a fantasy. Procedure, written into the documents themselves.
The state that never stopped asking
New Hampshire adopted the first written constitution any American state gave itself, on January 5, 1776, six months before the Declaration. The constitution now in force was adopted in October 1783 and took effect June 2, 1784. And in 1792 this state did what no government had done before: it wrote into its constitution a recurring referendum on whether to reconsider it, every seven years at first and every ten since 1964. New Hampshire has held seventeen constitutional conventions, more than any state in the union, against a national average of five. Those conventions proposed 64 amendments and the voters ratified 26 of them. The question has appeared on the ballot 36 times since 1799; the people have said yes 15 times, most recently calling the convention of 1984.
Lately the answer has been no. Voters declined a convention in 2012, 64 to 36, and again in 2022, two to one. No state anywhere has approved the question since Rhode Island in 1984. But a no vote is not the death of the mechanism; it is the mechanism working. The people are asked, the people look, the people decide. In April, Eric Herr argued in the Laconia Daily Sun that the years before 2032 should be spent in real public debate over what a convention could fix, in the press, the way the framers ran theirs. He is right. This essay and its two documents are my contribution, put on the table six years early so there is time to tear them apart.
In his own hand. Page one of the September 6, 1789 letter. Jefferson underlined the principle himself. Image: Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, public domain.
The world the parchment never met
Every generation thinks its moment is the hinge of history. Ours has receipts.
It reached this state first. Two days before the January 2024 presidential primary, thousands of New Hampshire phones rang with the voice of Joe Biden urging Democrats to stay home and hold their vote for November. The voice belonged to no one. A political consultant had paid a hundred and fifty dollars to have it cloned, then spoofed the caller ID of a prominent local Democrat, in what is regarded as the first deepfake deployed in American national politics. The FCC fined him $6 million. The state’s attorney general indicted him on twenty-six counts. And in June 2025, a Belknap County jury acquitted him of every state charge, persuaded that the statutes on the books did not quite reach the machine in the call. The first synthetic-voice attack on an American election was aimed at New Hampshire voters, and the law we had could not hold the man who launched it.
Start with the machines. The International Monetary Fund’s analysis of artificial intelligence and work found that nearly 40 percent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI, about 60 percent in advanced economies like ours, and that for roughly half of those exposed jobs, AI stands to perform the core tasks, pressing down on demand, wages, and hiring. Goldman Sachs put a companion number on it: the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs. The founding documents now govern a country whose dominant productive force may soon be something no eighteenth-century category anticipates: not labor, not property exactly, not a person, yet able to decide who gets a loan or a job, bail or a benefit. Neither constitution we live under contains the word.
And where governments have already handed judgment to machines, the returns are in. Michigan let an automated system called MiDAS decide unemployment-fraud cases with no human review; over roughly two years it falsely accused about 40,000 people, and an internal state review put the error rate at 93 percent of the cases it examined. Wages were garnished and tax refunds seized; penalties ran to 400 percent. Michigan’s highest court let the wrongly accused sue under the state constitution, and in 2024 the state paid $20 million to settle. The algorithmic due process articles in both of my drafts are not theory. They are the fence built where the bodies were found.
Now the money. The Federal Reserve’s own distributional accounts show that as of the first quarter of 2026, the wealthiest 1 percent of American households hold 31.6 percent of all household net worth in this country. The entire bottom half of the country holds 2.5 percent. The law produced that outcome, and the law protects it. RAND ran the counterfactual: had income growth stayed as broadly shared as it was in the three decades after the war, the bottom 90 percent of workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone, and $79 trillion more across the past half century. Concentrated wealth does not stay in its lane. The landmark Princeton study of 1,779 federal policy fights found that economic elites and organized business interests exert substantial independent influence over what government does, while the preferences of average citizens showed a “near-zero,” statistically non-significant effect. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page tested the theory that the median voter governs America. The data declined to support it.
Meanwhile the machinery has frozen. The House of Representatives has been capped at 435 seats since 1929, so the average district has swollen past 760,000 people, more than the entire population that ratified the Constitution in some states. Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents and California’s more than 39 million hold the same two Senate seats, giving a Wyoming voter more than sixty times the per-person weight. The Electoral College has installed the popular-vote loser twice this century, in 2000 and 2016. The Constitution has been amended 27 times in 237 years; the first ten arrived as one package in 1791, and the most recent waited 202 years between proposal and ratification. A charter that hard to touch does not stay neutral. It hardens around whoever holds power when the concrete sets.
Same two seats. Residents per Senate seat, from U.S. Census estimates. Graphic: GSR.
And at home, New Hampshire is living through a constitutional crisis in plain sight, over the plainest duty a state has. On July 1, 2025, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held, 3 to 2, that base education aid of roughly $4,100 per pupil is unconstitutionally low, affirming a trial court’s finding that an adequate education costs at least $7,356.01 per student. The gap runs past $500 million a year. Justice Nadeau’s dissent counted eleven school-funding cases since 1993 in which the court has never once found the legislature in compliance. Six weeks later, Judge David Ruoff ruled in the companion Rand case that the scheme violates the constitution’s command that education taxes be uniform, because state aid runs too low and local property taxes at wildly varying rates fill the hole.
The state’s answer, in February, was to appeal. In August it went further than any administration has gone in thirty years. The attorney general’s office told the Supreme Court that the Claremont decisions were wrongly decided and should be overturned outright. Claremont I had turned on a single word in Part II, Article 83, the command that legislators “cherish” the public schools; the state now says that reading “finds no basis in the text.” It argues in the alternative that school funding is a political question no court may review, and that taxpayers have no standing to sue at all. The Legislature has moved the same way. In March, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a law rewriting the state’s obligation into a “shared responsibility” with the towns. Natalie LaFlamme, counsel for the Rand plaintiffs, gave the Bulletin the rebuttal in one line: “It’s a state duty, and we’ve all understood it to be so,” and have for forty years.
Four of the five justices who will decide the case declined this spring to step aside, over objections that three had worked for the state against districts that sued it and the fourth had been counsel to the party that campaigned to overturn Claremont. Two of them, Chief Justice MacDonald and Justice Will, had recused themselves from ConVal itself, the chief as the attorney general who fought it and Will as the state’s lead lawyer. The state’s brief now asks the court to overrule ConVal, and on August 31 the plaintiffs asked those two justices, once more, to step aside. The court has said the chief justice is at present medically unable to work. By the plaintiffs’ counsel’s estimate, briefing closes in November and arguments could be heard as early as December.
The duty is being dodged because the revenue structure beneath it is broken, and the revenue structure is a constitutional artifact. Property taxes supply about 63 percent of all state and local tax revenue here, a greater share than in any other state, and New Hampshire ranks 48th in state aid to its own local governments. The lowest-income households pay an effective property-tax rate roughly three times what the highest-income households pay. A $500,000 house owes $1,310 a year in Hart’s Location and $18,270 in Charlestown. Meanwhile a state tied for second-oldest in the nation, median age 43.4, needed 23,500 more homes in 2023 and will need 90,000 more by 2040, with the median single-family price at a record $540,000 in June 2024, about 49 percent of a median household’s income to carry. These are one story: a founding-era revenue design meeting a century it cannot fund, and a constitution whose education promise the state is in court trying to unmake. I made the case for reform within the current constitution last fall. The deeper fix belongs in the document itself.
Thirty-three years, and the duty is still in dispute. The rulings, and the Legislature’s answer to them. Graphic: GSR.
Read the state’s arguments together and they describe a constitutional duty that no court may review and no taxpayer may enforce. That is a request to be relieved of the constitution rather than a defense of it, and it is the sharpest argument I know for writing the duty in words that cannot be read away. The education and judicial-duty articles of the draft below are that attempt.
Two documents, offered for argument
So I wrote them. Both are free to download below, and both are labeled what they are on every page: works of argument, not law.
The New Hampshire draft keeps what this state should never surrender. The Right of Revolution, Part First, Article 10, the boldest sentence in any American constitution, is preserved word for word. The 400-member House stays, because a legislature where one representative answers to about thirty-five hundred neighbors is a feature the rest of the country should envy. The Executive Council stays, with its business forced fully into the open. The decennial convention question stays, protected by a clause that no future amendment may remove it. What changes is what the last forty years have proven broken. The education article becomes enforceable, and it cannot be shared away: the state must define an adequate education and determine its true cost, then pay it from uniform statewide revenue, and no statute may rename the duty a joint one. The courts may not duck it by calling it a political question, because the people, in ratifying the article, would have decided the political question themselves. A revenue article requires the state to measure the regressivity of its tax system every two years, publish the measurement, and correct it. The right to know gains teeth: fee limits, attorney’s fees for wrongly refused requests, and coverage that follows public records into contractors and automated systems. The 2018 privacy amendment grows into a data-rights article: what the state may not seize, it may not buy from a broker. A new article guarantees algorithmic due process: no algorithm may strip a person of liberty or property, or of any public benefit, without notice and reasons and a human being with authority to overrule it. An environmental trust article follows the Montana model its Supreme Court just proved has force. Emergency powers sunset in 28 days. Articles on housing and on workers in the age of automation follow, and a citizens’ assembly chosen by lot studies the constitution and reports to every household before each decennial question. Legislator pay rises from the $200 per term fixed in 1889-era amber to one-quarter of the state’s median household income — enough that a working parent, and not only the retired or the wealthy, can afford to serve.
The people’s house. The State House in Concord, opened 1819, the oldest U.S. capitol where the legislature still meets in its original chambers. Photo: Quintin Soloviev, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Part the First and Part the Second, 44 articles, each drafted to stand alone so a convention could adopt, amend, or reject any one without losing the others.
Download the N.H. draft (PDF) →
The full text of the proposed New Hampshire ConstitutionPart the First and Part the Second, 44 articles · about 4,364 words · click to read the whole draft here, no download needed
This is a proposed revision of the New Hampshire Constitution, offered as a working document for public debate ahead of the constitutional-convention question that Part Second, Article 100 of the current constitution places on every ballot in November 2032. It is not law. The constitution now in force is the one that took effect June 2, 1784, as amended by the people. This draft keeps the architecture New Hampshire built — a Bill of Rights first, a Form of Government second, a citizen legislature, and the standing question of its own revision — and renews it for a century the framers of 1784 could not have imagined: a century of concentrated wealth, concentrated data, thinking machines, and a climate in motion. Each article is drafted to stand alone, so that a convention may adopt, amend, or reject any one without losing the others. Where this draft preserves language from the current constitution, it does so deliberately. Some sentences should never be improved, only kept.
TO THE PEOPLE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE
You hold a draft, not a decree. It carries no authority except the authority of argument, and it asks for nothing except what your own constitution already asks of you: that once every ten years you look at the foundation beneath your government and decide whether it still bears your weight.
No people on this continent is better fitted to that work. Your ancestors wrote the first constitution any American state gave itself, in January of 1776, while the outcome of the Revolution was still a wager. They wrote the one you live under in 1784, and in 1792 they did a thing no government on earth had done: they set an appointment with their own descendants, a recurring question, so that no generation of this state would ever be governed by a document it never had the chance to refuse. Seventeen conventions have kept that appointment, more than in any other state. Sixty-four times those conventions offered you amendments; twenty-six times you said yes, and the rest you sent home. You have been careful. You have never been idle.
This draft is written in that tradition and for that appointment. It keeps everything the years have proven: the boldest Bill of Rights sentence in America, the great House where a representative answers to a few thousand neighbors instead of to donors, the council that watches the governor, the question that watches everything. It changes what the years have proven broken, and it adds what the framers could not foresee, because no one in 1784 imagined a machine that could deny a family its benefits, an election swayed by a counterfeit voice, or a school-funding promise argued in court for thirty years while the children it was made to grew up and had children of their own.
Read it the way your ancestors read theirs: aloud, in disagreement, with a pencil. Strike what is wrong. Keep what is right. And when the ballot asks its question, answer it as the owner of the house, and not as its tenant.
Northfield, New Hampshire · September 15, 2026 · The two hundred fiftieth year of American independence
PREAMBLE
We, the people of New Hampshire, heirs of the first written constitution any American state gave itself and keepers of the question it commands us to ask each decade, take up again the work our founders never intended to finish. They raised a government, and into its frame they built the standing invitation to raise it anew, for they knew what every builder in granite country knows: that the earth belongs to the living, and that a free people must be free, above all, from the dead hand of arrangements that no longer serve them.
We do not tear down what they built. We honor it the way they honored what came before — by testing every grant of power against the needs of the living generation, keeping what shelters the people, and rewriting what shelters power instead. We hold that government exists for the common benefit and never for the private gain of any class; that the machinery of the state must answer as readily to the family of ordinary means as to the fortune of great wealth; that no algorithm, no corporation, and no office may stand between a citizen and the government that is theirs; and that the mountains and rivers, the forests and the clear air of this state, are a trust we keep for children not yet born.
To these ends, we the people of New Hampshire do ordain and establish this Constitution for the State of New Hampshire.
PART THE FIRST — BILL OF RIGHTS
Article 1. Equality and Origin of Government. All persons are born equally free and independent. All government of right originates from the people, is founded in their consent, and is instituted for the general good. No person shall be denied the equal protection or the equal benefit of the law, nor suffer discrimination by the state on account of race, color, creed, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability, age, national origin, or economic condition.
Article 2. Natural Rights. All persons have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights — among them the enjoying and defending of life and liberty; the acquiring, possessing, and protecting of property; and the seeking and obtaining of happiness. These rights belong to the person, not to the government, and their listing here does not exhaust them.
Article 3. Government for the Common Benefit. Government is instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one person, family, or class of persons. Whenever public power is found serving concentrated private wealth against the general good, the people have the right, by the procedures of this constitution, to reform it.
Article 4. The Right of Revolution. Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to, reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind. (Preserved from Part First, Article 10 of the constitution of 1784, without the alteration of a word. Some sentences are load-bearing.)
Article 5. Conscience and the Secular State. Every person has the natural and unalienable right to worship according to the dictates of conscience and reason, or not to worship at all, and no person shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in person, liberty, or estate for religious profession, sentiment, or the absence of either. The state shall neither establish nor favor any religion, and public power shall rest on reasons open to all.
Article 6. Speech and the Press. Free speech and liberty of the press are essential to the security of freedom in a state; they ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved. No law shall lay prior restraint on expression. The right of the people to record, document, and publish the conduct of public officials performing public duties in public places shall not be abridged.
Article 7. The Public’s Right to Know. Government, being the people’s, shall be open to the people. Every person has the right to inspect and copy the records of all public bodies and to attend their proceedings, and this access shall not be unreasonably restricted. The right is enforceable by any person: a public body that wrongly withholds a record or closes a meeting shall bear the requester’s reasonable costs and attorney’s fees, and knowing violation by an official is cause for removal from office. No fee shall be set that places the inspection of public records beyond a person of ordinary means. A record does not shed its public character because it is held, processed, or generated by a private contractor or an automated system performing the public’s work. (Extends Part First, Article 8, ratified by the people in 1976 and strengthened by them in 2018, from a stated principle into an enforceable command.)
Article 8. Privacy of the Person and of Information. An individual’s right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent. That right follows a person into the records their life now writes: their communications and movements, their associations and health, their finances, their reading, their searches. The state shall not collect, purchase, or compel such information except by warrant upon probable cause, by consent freely given, or by a law narrowly drawn to a compelling public need. What the state may not take by force, it may not buy from a broker. (Extends Part First, Article 2-b, ratified by the people in 2018.)
Article 9. Algorithmic Due Process. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, property, or any public benefit, license, or right by the decision of an automated system, an artificial intelligence, or an algorithm, except with these guarantees: notice that a machine was used; a plain-language statement of the principal reasons for the decision; access to the material facts the machine relied on; and timely review by a human officer with the authority to reverse it. The state bears the burden of showing that any such system it uses is accurate, is free of unlawful discrimination, and has been tested and disclosed as the law shall provide. A decision that cannot be explained to the person it binds cannot bind them.
Article 10. Due Process and Equality Before the Law. No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property except by due process of law — notice, a hearing before an impartial tribunal, and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. The same law governs the governed and the governing.
Article 11. Rights of the Accused. Every person held to answer for a crime has the right to know the charge; to counsel, at public expense if indigent; to confront witnesses and compel evidence; to a speedy and public trial by jury in the vicinity; and to freedom from compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy, excessive bail, and cruel or unusual punishment. Evidence obtained in violation of this constitution shall not be used to convict.
Article 12. Searches and Seizures. Every person has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches and seizures of their person, houses, papers, effects, and data. No warrant shall issue but on probable cause, supported by oath, particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons, things, or data to be seized.
Article 13. Free and Fair Elections. All elections are to be free, and every inhabitant of the state of eighteen years and upward has an equal right to vote in any election and to have that vote counted as it was cast. The right to vote shall not be denied or burdened except as strict necessity requires, and the state carries the burden of justifying every such restriction. No person shall, by fraud, deception, or the impersonation of any person living or dead by any means, including synthetic or machine-generated voice or likeness, interfere with an election or deceive a voter concerning the time, place, manner, or consequence of voting; the general court shall provide penalties adequate to the harm. Electoral districts at every level shall be drawn without favor to any party, incumbent, or candidate.
Article 14. Political Equality. The political power of a citizen shall not rise or fall with the citizen’s wealth. Elections and public deliberation belong to the people. The general court shall have the power, and the duty, to limit the influence of concentrated money upon them; to require full and immediate disclosure of every substantial expenditure meant to sway an election or a public official; and to provide means by which candidates of ordinary means may seek office. Nothing in this constitution grants to artificial entities — corporations, associations, or automated agents — the political rights of natural persons.
Article 15. Remedies and Open Courts. Every person is entitled to a certain remedy, by recourse to the laws, for all injuries to person, property, character, or the rights this constitution secures — freely, completely, and without delay. Every taxpayer of this state has standing to seek a declaration that the state or a public body has violated this constitution or the law. (The taxpayer-standing guarantee, ratified by the people in 2018, is preserved here.)
Article 16. Education. Knowledge and learning, generally diffused through a community, being essential to the preservation of a free government, every child in this state holds the right to an adequate public education. It shall be the duty of the state to define that education in substance; to determine its true cost by an honest and public accounting; and to pay that cost from state revenues raised in a manner equal in valuation and uniform in rate throughout the state. The state shall not discharge this duty by laying upon the taxpayers of some towns what the taxpayers of others are spared. The duty is the state’s own; no statute may reassign it to the state’s political subdivisions, nor dilute it by naming it shared. The supreme court shall have jurisdiction to enforce this article at the suit of any student, parent, district, or taxpayer, and no doctrine of deference or of political questions shall excuse a failure of the duty here imposed — for the people, in ratifying this article, will have decided the political question themselves.
Article 17. The Environmental Trust. Every person, including the generations to come, has the right to a clean and healthful environment. The air and waters, the forests and wildlife, and the natural resources of New Hampshire are held by the state in trust for the people, present and future. The state and every person shall maintain and improve this trust; the state shall consider and disclose the environmental consequences of its actions, including the consequences for a stable climate; and this right is enforceable by any person, on their own behalf or on behalf of those not yet born.
Article 18. Property and Its Limits. Private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation, and no part of a person’s property shall be taken by eminent domain and transferred to another person for private development or private use. (Preserves the substance of Article 12-a, ratified 2006.) All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property, and the state. (Preserves Article 2-a, ratified 1982.)
Article 19. The Right to Seek a Home. The opportunity to obtain housing is the ground on which every other right in this constitution stands. Neither the state nor its municipalities shall, by regulation or by inaction, arbitrarily exclude housing sufficient for the people of this state. The general court shall provide by law for the measurement of housing need and for its remedy, and no municipal power delegated by the state may be turned against this article’s purpose.
Article 20. Workers and Livelihood. Every person has the right to seek a livelihood, to organize and bargain collectively, and to safe conditions of work. When systems of automation or artificial intelligence displace the labor of the people of this state on a large scale, it shall be the duty of the general court to provide for the retraining, transition, and security of those displaced, that the gains of the machine age not be gathered by the few from the losses of the many.
Article 21. Emergency Powers Limited. Necessity may compel swift action; it may never suspend this constitution. Every declaration of emergency shall be public and shall state its factual basis; it expires within twenty-eight days unless renewed by a recorded majority of each house of the general court; and it is subject to review by the courts, which remain open. No emergency shall suspend elections, the courts, the right to counsel, or the public’s right to know.
Article 22. Future Generations. In every exercise of public power, the state shall weigh the interests of those who will live with its consequences after the officeholders are gone. Public debts, resource commitments, and environmental burdens that fall principally upon future generations shall be undertaken only with deliberate and recorded justification.
Article 23. Construction of This Bill of Rights. The enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. In every doubt, this Part shall be read in favor of the liberty and dignity of the person, and against the accumulation of unaccountable power — governmental, economic, or technological.
PART THE SECOND — FORM OF GOVERNMENT
Title I. The State and Its Powers
Article 24. The people inhabiting the territory formerly called the Province of New Hampshire do hereby solemnly and mutually agree with each other to form themselves into a free, sovereign, and independent body politic, or state, by the name of THE STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE.
Article 25. The powers of government are divided among a legislative, an executive, and a judicial branch, each independent within its sphere and each a check upon the others. No branch shall exercise the core functions of another.
Title II. The General Court
Article 26. Composition. The supreme legislative power is vested in the senate and the house of representatives, together called the general court. The house shall consist of not fewer than three hundred seventy-five nor more than four hundred members, that New Hampshire may keep the most representative legislature in America — a body in which a representative answers to a few thousand neighbors, and not to donors. The senate shall consist of twenty-four members.
Article 27. The Citizen Legislature, Honestly Kept. A citizen legislature that only the retired and the wealthy can afford to join is a citizen legislature in name. Members of the general court shall therefore receive an annual compensation equal to one-quarter of the median household income of the state, as most recently determined by the federal census authority, together with actual mileage; the presiding officers shall receive an additional one-tenth. No member shall vote on a question in which the member or the member’s household has a direct and substantial financial interest, and every member shall publicly disclose the sources of their income and the identity of any employer or client with business before the state.
Article 28. Independent Redistricting. The districts of the house, the senate, the executive council, and the state’s representation in Congress shall be drawn each decade by an independent citizens’ commission, none of whose members shall be, or within four years shall have been, an officeholder, a candidate, a lobbyist, or an officer of a political party. Districts shall be contiguous, shall respect town and ward lines so far as practicable, and shall be drawn without regard to the addresses of incumbents or the partisan color of the electorate. The commission’s maps take effect upon adoption, reviewable by the supreme court only for violation of this article.
Article 29. Open Deliberation. Every vote of consequence in the general court shall be a recorded vote. No bill shall become law whose text has not stood public for at least seven days before final passage, except upon a recorded two-thirds vote of each house declaring an emergency and stating its factual basis. Every bill shall say plainly, in a public fiscal note, who pays its costs — including the costs it shifts downward onto municipalities and property taxpayers.
Article 30. Lawmaking Power and Its Limits. The general court may make all wholesome and reasonable laws not repugnant to this constitution. It shall grant to no private person or corporation an exclusive privilege denied to others similarly situated, and no law shall be drawn to serve, in fact, a single identifiable private beneficiary unless it names that beneficiary openly.
Title III. The Executive
Article 31. The Governor. The supreme executive power is vested in a governor, elected by the people for a term of four years; no person shall serve more than two terms. (The two-year term of 1784, kept today by only New Hampshire and Vermont, held the executive on a short leash in an age when the leash was the chief concern. A four-year term with a two-term limit trades a little leash for the capacity to plan beyond the next campaign, and pays for the trade with the limit itself, with the council, and with the strengthened right to know.)
Article 32. The Executive Council. There shall be an executive council of five members, elected by the people for terms of two years, whose advice and consent shall be required for nominations to judicial and major executive office, for pardons, and for every state contract above a threshold the law shall set. The council shall do its business in public, and every contract, nomination, and pardon before it shall be published before the vote is taken.
Article 33. Administration Under Law. Every agency of the state exercises only the power the law gives it — in public, on a record, with reasons. Where an agency employs an automated system to make or support decisions affecting rights or benefits, Article 9 of Part the First applies in full, and the system, its purpose, and the results of its testing shall be matters of public record.
Title IV. The Judiciary
Article 34. The judicial power is vested in a supreme court, a superior court, and such lower courts as the general court may establish. Judges shall be nominated by the governor with the advice and consent of the council; shall hold office during good behavior until the age of seventy-five; and shall be removable for cause by address or impeachment. The courts shall be open, their records public, and justice administered without sale, denial, or delay.
Article 35. Judicial Duty. It is the duty of the courts to give effect to every article of this constitution. Where this constitution lays an affirmative duty upon the state — as it does for education, for open government, and for the environmental trust — the courts shall not decline to enforce it on the ground that the question is political. The people, in ratifying this constitution, answered the political question themselves.
Title V. Revenue and the Public Purse
Article 36. Equality of Public Burdens. Every member of the community is bound to contribute a share of the expense of the protection they receive, in proportion to their means. All taxes shall be proportionate and reasonable, equal in valuation and uniform in rate upon the class of property or activity taxed, and the whole scheme of state and local revenue shall be just. A revenue system that takes from households of the least means a share of their income several times greater than it takes from households of the greatest means is not proportional; it shall be the continuing duty of the general court to measure the distribution of the state’s tax burden, to publish that measurement every two years, and to correct substantial regressivity.
Article 37. The Education Trust. The state’s duty under Article 16 of Part the First shall be funded first, before discretionary expenditure, from revenues raised at rates uniform throughout the state. No scheme shall be maintained under which the state’s share of the cost of public education is supplied, in substance, by local property taxation at rates that vary from town to town according to the wealth beneath them.
Article 38. Honest Accounts. The state shall publish its budget, its contracts, its debts, and its accounts in a form an ordinary citizen can read and a machine can process. No obligation of the state shall be hidden from the people who must pay it.
Title VI. Municipalities
Article 39. Towns, cities, and counties are instruments of the people who inhabit them. The state shall not mandate new or expanded programs to its political subdivisions without providing the funds to carry them out. (Preserves the substance of Article 28-a, ratified 1984.) Municipal powers shall be exercised consistently with the rights declared in Part the First, including Article 19.
Title VII. Amendment and Renewal
Article 40. The Standing Question. Amendments to this constitution may be proposed by a three-fifths vote of the entire membership of each house of the general court, or by a constitutional convention. The question “Shall there be a convention to amend or revise the constitution?” shall be submitted to the voters at least once in every period of ten years; if the general court has not submitted it sooner, the secretary of state shall place it on the ballot at the general election in the tenth year. A majority of those voting on the question calls the convention. Delegates shall be chosen as representatives to the general court are chosen, and no person holding state office, and no registered lobbyist, may serve as a delegate. The convention may propose amendments, or a revised constitution, by a three-fifths vote of its entire membership.
Article 41. The People’s Assent. Every amendment, and every revision, takes effect only upon approval by two-thirds of the qualified voters present and voting on the subject. Nothing becomes fundamental law in New Hampshire but by the deliberate act of the people themselves.
Article 42. The Citizens’ Assembly. In the year before each decennial convention question, the secretary of state shall convene a citizens’ assembly of inhabitants selected by lot, representative of the state in age, region, and condition, to study the constitution, hear the public, and publish a report on whether revision is needed and what it should address. The assembly’s report shall reach every household before the ballot on which the question appears. The assembly proposes; only the people, by the procedures of this Title, dispose.
Article 43. What May Not Be Taken. No amendment or revision shall abolish the equality of persons declared in Article 1, the Right of Revolution declared in Article 4, the public’s right to know declared in Article 7, the free elections declared in Article 13, or this Title’s guarantee that the question of revision returns to the people each decade. These are not any generation’s to surrender, for they are the instruments by which every generation to come keeps its own power to decide all the rest.
Article 44. Transition. This constitution, upon ratification by two-thirds of the qualified voters voting thereon, takes effect on the following first Wednesday of January. Laws, rights, obligations, offices, and proceedings existing under the constitution of 1784, as amended, continue except as inconsistent with this constitution. The general court shall enact conforming legislation within two years, and until it does, existing statutes shall be construed to serve, and not defeat, the articles written here.
Proposed and offered for public debate by Dexter Dow, editor, Granite State Report, Northfield, New Hampshire. A work of argument, not law. The path to adoption runs through Part Second, Article 100 of the current constitution: a convention question the people may approve by majority, delegates the people elect, proposals three-fifths of those delegates must approve, and a ratification that only two-thirds of the voters themselves can give.
The federal draft is a complete renewal in twelve articles. It elects the president by national popular vote decided by ranked choice, and it unfreezes the House from its 1929 cap. It writes majority rule for ordinary legislation into the text, ending the filibuster’s standing supermajority, and places a single eighteen-year term on Supreme Court justices, staggered so every president appoints two and no seat freezes a generation’s politics in place for decades. It moves the public’s right to know from repealable statute into the supreme law, with an independent anti-corruption authority to enforce the rest of it. Its bill of rights covers the ground the parchment could not see. It protects privacy and data against state and corporate surveillance alike. It guarantees algorithmic due process. It holds the environment in trust for generations not yet born, which about 150 national constitutions already do and ours does not. Some of this is old American business. Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress in January 1944 for a second bill of rights, telling the country that “necessitous men are not free men.” His list, from a decent job and home to medical care and security in old age, has waited eighty years. Three further provisions aim at the century ahead. When automation displaces labor at scale, government carries an affirmative duty of transition, so the gains of the machine age are not gathered by the few from the losses of the many. The taxing power expressly reaches extraordinary gains from AI and automation, which were built on generations of public investment. Concentrations of private power great enough to dominate markets or capture government are named as the danger they are, with Congress under a standing duty to dissolve them. A catastrophic-risks section obliges the government to see the next pandemic or runaway system coming, and strips trade secrecy of the power to hide such dangers from the people’s representatives. And at the center sits the answer to Madison: a national convention every nineteen years, mandatory, while the existing constitution stays in force until the people revise or reaffirm it. The generation gets its scheduled say. The republic never goes dark between drafts.
The original. Page one of the 1787 parchment, engrossed by Jacob Shallus. Image: National Archives, public domain.
A complete renewal for the living generation: twelve articles, from the declaration of rights to the nineteen-year renewal clause, with ratification procedure included.
Download the U.S. draft (PDF) →
The full text of the proposed United States ConstitutionTwelve articles, preamble to ratification · about 7,037 words · click to read the whole draft here, no download needed
This is a proposed founding document — a complete redraft offered as a work of constitutional design and public argument. It is not current law. The Constitution now in force is the document ratified in 1788 and amended since. This text is written to be debated, revised, and, if a generation chose, ratified to replace it. It is built on a single conviction that Thomas Jefferson set down in his 1789 letter to James Madison: the earth belongs to the living, and no generation has the right to bind those who come after it to a frame of government they had no hand in making. The figure Jefferson worked from was roughly nineteen years, the span of a generation. That principle sits at the center of this draft.
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
What follows is a draft, and a draft is an act of respect. It assumes you are what the founders assumed you were: a people capable of reading a plan of government and judging it, capable of what the first Federalist paper dared to hope for, a government established by thinking and choosing rather than inherited from accident and force.
The charter you live under is the oldest written national constitution still operating on earth, and it earned its age. It has carried this republic through civil war, depression, and a century of storms, and every proposal in this draft stands on its shoulders. But age is a fact, not an argument, and the honest facts are these. The document has been amended twenty-seven times in two hundred thirty-seven years, and not once in the living memory of most Americans now alive. It counts a citizen of one state as worth sixty of another in the Senate. It has twice this century installed a president the voters did not choose. It contains no word for the machines that now decide who is hired, insured, believed, or accused, and no answer for a concentration of wealth its authors would have recognized instantly, because it is the thing they crossed an ocean to escape.
This draft does not ask you to revere less. It asks you to inherit more — to receive the founders’ whole bequest, which was never merely a text, but the audacity to write one. They were handed a government that could not be lawfully mended, and they mended it anyway, and called the people themselves as the highest court of the question. That court has never adjourned. It is you.
Read this the way a juror reads: without deference and without contempt, weighing each article on the evidence. Where it is wrong, say so, loudly, in public, with your name attached. That argument — not this text — is the point.
Northfield, New Hampshire · September 15, 2026 · The two hundred fiftieth year of American independence
PREAMBLE
We, the people of the United States, having received from our forebears a republic and the duty to deserve it, do now renew the work they began. They wrote for their age with such wisdom that their charter outlived every constitution written since; we honor them not by embalming their text but by imitating their courage, which was the courage to begin.
We hold these purposes: to secure to every person the equal dignity that is theirs by birth and not by grant; to keep the powers of government forever answerable to the governed; to see that neither wealth nor office nor machine stands between a citizen and the common life of the nation; to share the fruits of common knowledge and common labor as the inheritance of all; to guard the earth, the peace, and the generations to come; and to keep this Constitution itself the living act of a living people, renewed by each generation with its own hands and its own consent.
To these ends, we ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
ARTICLE I — FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLES
Section 1. Sovereignty of the People.
All governing authority derives from the people. Officials hold power as a public trust, exercise it only on the people’s behalf, and remain answerable to the people at all times. No person and no office stands above this Constitution or above the law.
Section 2. Supremacy and Scope.
This Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. Every law, treaty, regulation, order, and act of any official at any level of government is subordinate to it and is void to the extent it conflicts with it.
Section 3. The Rule of Law and Equality Before It.
The same law governs the governed and the governing. Every person is entitled to the equal protection of the law and to equal treatment by it. No one may be punished except under a law in force at the time of the act, applied through fair procedure.
Section 4. Separation and Limitation of Powers.
The powers of government are divided among a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary, each independent within its sphere and each a check upon the others. No branch may absorb the core functions of another. Power is granted to be limited, and every grant of power in this Constitution carries with it the limits this Constitution sets.
Section 5. Democratic Legitimacy.
Government rests on the consent of the governed, expressed through free, fair, frequent, and secret elections open to all citizens of voting age. No authority is legitimate that is not, directly or through accountable representatives, traceable to that consent.
Section 6. Neutrality of the State in Matters of Conscience.
The government shall neither establish nor favor any religion or system of belief, nor penalize any person for their beliefs or lack of belief. Public authority is exercised on secular grounds open to reason and shared by all, and never as the instrument of any creed.
Section 7. The Principle of Generational Renewal.
This Constitution belongs to the living. It binds those now governed because they may revise it, and it commits every generation to examine and renew it through the procedures of Article XI. The duty of renewal, and the people’s standing right to alter or replace their government, are permanent features of this compact and may not be removed.
ARTICLE II — DECLARATION OF RIGHTS
The rights set out here are inherent, not granted by government. Their listing is not exhaustive, and the people retain other rights not named. Government bears the burden of justifying any limit on a right.
Section 1. Equality and Non-Discrimination.
Every person is equal before the law and entitled to its equal protection and equal benefit. No law or official act may discriminate against any person on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national or social origin, sex, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy, disability, age, religion or belief, language, or economic condition. This guarantee does not forbid measures designed to remedy past or present disadvantage.
Section 2. Human Dignity, Life, Liberty, and Security.
Every person has the right to life, to liberty, and to security of the person. No one may be subjected to slavery, servitude, forced labor, torture, or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment. Human dignity is inviolable and is the foundation of every right in this Article.
Section 3. Due Process.
No person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property except through fair procedure under law, including notice, a hearing before an impartial tribunal, and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. Punishment without trial, indefinite detention without charge, and the use of secret evidence against a person are prohibited.
Section 4. Freedom of Conscience, Thought, and Religion.
Every person has the right to hold and to change their beliefs, religious or otherwise, and to practice or abstain from any religion, alone or with others, in private or in public. No one may be compelled to profess a belief or to support a religion.
Section 5. Freedom of Expression.
Every person has the right to seek, hold, and share opinions, ideas, and information of any kind, in any medium. There shall be no prior restraint on expression and no punishment of expression except where it directly incites imminent violence, constitutes a true threat, or causes a defined and serious harm that no lesser measure can prevent. The expression of unpopular, offensive, or dissenting views is fully protected.
Section 6. Freedom of the Press.
A free and independent press is essential to self-government and is protected as a structural check on power. Government shall not license, censor, or retaliate against the press, nor compel journalists to disclose their sources except by court order on a showing of overriding necessity that cannot otherwise be met. The protections of this Section extend to every person who gathers or publishes information for the public, in any medium, and are not limited to any class or profession.
Section 7. Freedom of Assembly, Association, and Petition.
Every person has the right to assemble peacefully, to associate freely with others, to form and join organizations including labor unions and political parties, and to petition the government and demand a response. No one may be compelled to join an association or punished for lawful membership in one.
Section 8. Privacy and Data Rights.
Every person has the right to privacy in their body, home, communications, movements, associations, and personal data. Government may search, seize, intercept, or surveil only on a particularized warrant issued by a judge upon probable cause, describing what is sought, except in narrowly defined emergencies subject to prompt judicial review. Mass or suspicionless surveillance of the population is prohibited. Every person has the right to know what data government and large private entities hold about them, to correct it, and to limit its collection, retention, sale, and use. Personal data may not be used to profile, score, or penalize a person without lawful authority and meaningful safeguards.
Section 9. Bodily Autonomy.
Every person has the right to make decisions about their own body and medical care, free from coercion. Government may regulate only to protect health and safety through the least restrictive means, and may not subject a person to medical or bodily intervention without informed consent except where another person’s life is at immediate risk and the law expressly so provides.
Section 10. Rights of Persons Accused of Crime.
A person accused of a crime is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Every such person has the right to be informed of the charges; to a speedy and public trial before an impartial jury; to confront the evidence and witnesses against them; to compel evidence in their favor; to remain silent without that silence being used against them; to competent counsel provided at public expense if they cannot afford it; to reasonable bail; to be free from double jeopardy for the same offense; and to challenge any detention before a court without delay. Evidence obtained in violation of this Constitution may not be used against the accused.
Section 11. Proportionate Punishment.
Punishment must be proportionate to the offense. Cruel, degrading, and excessive punishments are prohibited. No person may be sentenced to death. Incarceration shall serve the lawful ends of public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation, and shall preserve the dignity and basic rights of the incarcerated.
Section 12. Property.
Every person has the right to own property and to be secure in it. Property may be taken for a genuine public purpose only under law and only with just compensation paid in advance where practicable. The right of property does not place wealth beyond the reach of fair taxation or reasonable regulation in the public interest.
Section 13. The Right to Vote and to Participate.
Every citizen of voting age has the right to vote and to stand for office. This right is affirmative and may not be denied or abridged. It is the duty of government to register eligible voters, to make voting accessible, and to remove obstacles to the equal exercise of the franchise. The administration of this right is governed by Article III.
Section 14. Education.
Every person has the right to free public education through the secondary level and to access to higher and vocational education without barriers of wealth. Government shall provide and adequately fund education of sufficient quality to prepare each person for participation in civic and economic life.
Section 15. Health, Subsistence, and Security.
Every person has the right of access to necessary health care, to adequate food, clean water, and shelter, and to security in old age, illness, disability, and involuntary unemployment. Government shall progressively realize these rights to the maximum of its available resources, through means it determines, and shall not act to deprive any person of an existing measure of these protections without sufficient justification.
Section 16. Labor.
Every person has the right to work freely chosen, to just and safe conditions, to fair remuneration, to organize and bargain collectively, and to withhold labor. Forced labor and exploitative child labor are prohibited. When automation, artificial intelligence, or other systems displace human labor on a large scale, government has an affirmative duty to provide for the retraining, transition, and economic security of those displaced, so that the gains of the machine age are not gathered by the few from the losses of the many.
Section 17. A Healthy Environment.
Every person, including those not yet born, has the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The natural resources and ecological systems of the country are held in trust by government for present and future generations. Government has a continuing duty to protect the environment, to prevent and remedy ecological harm, and to act to mitigate threats to the climate and the conditions of life.
Section 18. Rights of the Child.
In every action concerning a child, the best interests of the child are a primary consideration. Every child has the right to a name, a nationality, protection from abuse, neglect, and exploitation, and the care necessary for their development.
Section 19. Emerging Technology and Automated Decision-Making.
Where government uses automated or algorithmic systems to make or substantially inform a decision affecting a person’s rights, benefits, liberty, or legal standing, that person has the right to be told that such a system was used, to an explanation of the basis for the decision, to meaningful human review, and to challenge the decision. Systems that government uses to exercise public authority over persons shall be open to examination sufficient to test them for accuracy and bias. The exercise of core governmental authority, and ultimate accountability for it, shall remain with human officials answerable under this Constitution.
Section 20. Access to Justice.
Every person has the right of access to independent courts to vindicate their rights, and the right to legal assistance, provided at public expense where the person cannot afford it and a fundamental interest such as liberty, the care of a child, or the loss of a home is at stake.
Section 21. Limitation of Rights.
A right in this Article may be limited only by a law that serves a legitimate and substantial public aim, that is rationally connected to that aim, that impairs the right no more than necessary, and whose benefit is proportionate to the cost to the right. The burden of justifying a limitation rests on the government.
Section 22. Rights That May Never Be Suspended.
No emergency, war, or claim of necessity may justify the suspension of the following: the right to life; freedom from torture and from cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment; freedom from slavery and forced labor; freedom of conscience and belief; the prohibition of punishment without trial; the right to challenge a detention before a court; and the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds named in Section 1. These rights are non-derogable.
ARTICLE III — CITIZENSHIP, ELECTIONS, AND POLITICAL EQUALITY
Section 1. Citizenship.
Every person born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, and every person born to a citizen, is a citizen. Citizenship may also be acquired by naturalization under general laws that are fair and non-discriminatory. No citizen may be deprived of citizenship against their will except for naturalization obtained by fraud.
Section 2. Universal Suffrage.
Every citizen who has reached the age of majority has the right to vote. Government shall provide automatic and secure registration of eligible voters, accessible polling and voting methods, and sufficient time and means to vote. Disenfranchisement as a punishment is prohibited; a citizen retains the right to vote regardless of conviction or incarceration.
Section 3. Free and Fair Elections.
Elections shall be free, fair, frequent, secret, and competitive. The drawing of districts, the administration of elections, and the counting of votes shall be conducted by independent, nonpartisan bodies insulated from control by any candidate, party, or branch of government. Results shall be verifiable through transparent procedures and routine audits.
Section 4. Fair Representation.
Legislative elections shall be conducted by methods that produce representation reflecting the votes cast, through proportional representation, multi-member districts with ranked choice, or equivalent means, so far as practicable. Executive offices filled by a single person shall be elected by a method requiring majority support, including ranked choice with instant runoff where no candidate first secures a majority.
Section 5. Districting.
Where districts are used, they shall be drawn by an independent commission according to neutral criteria, including equal population, contiguity, respect for communities, and competitiveness, and without favor to any party, candidate, or incumbent. The drawing of districts to entrench political advantage is prohibited.
Section 6. Money in Politics.
The financing of campaigns and of political activity is subject to regulation in the public interest. Government shall provide for the public financing of elections sufficient to allow candidates of ordinary means to compete. All political spending and its sources shall be disclosed promptly and publicly. Limits on contributions and on coordinated and concentrated spending are permitted to protect the integrity of elections and the political equality of citizens. For the purposes of political rights, the people are persons; the regulation of the political spending of corporations and other entities is within the power of government.
Section 7. Protection of the Franchise.
The dilution, suppression, or unequal administration of the right to vote is prohibited and shall be subject to prompt judicial remedy. Government bears the burden of justifying any law or practice that burdens the right to vote.
ARTICLE IV — THE LEGISLATURE
Section 1. Vesting and Structure.
The legislative power of the United States is vested in a Congress consisting of two chambers, the House of the People and the Council of the Republic. A law requires the agreement of both chambers, subject to the procedures of this Article.
Section 2. The House of the People.
The House of the People represents the people directly and is apportioned among the States in proportion to population, with each State guaranteed at least one Representative. The total number of Representatives shall be set by law according to a formula that grows the chamber with the population so that representation remains close to the people, and shall not be frozen to entrench malapportionment. Representatives are elected for terms of four years by the proportional methods of Article III. No person may serve as a Representative for more than three terms.
Section 3. The Council of the Republic.
The Council of the Republic represents the States within the federal union and serves as a chamber of deliberation and review. Seats in the Council are allocated among the States by a formula combining a small equal base for every State with an allocation by population, such that representation is substantially proportional to population while preserving a federal voice for each State, and such that the disparity in representation per person between any two States does not exceed four to one. Members of the Council are elected for terms of six years, staggered so that a portion is chosen at each general election, by the proportional methods of Article III. No person may serve in the Council for more than two terms.
Section 4. Powers of Congress.
Congress has power to make all laws necessary and proper to the general welfare of the United States and to the exercise of the authorities of this Constitution, including the power to:
1. lay and collect fair and, where it chooses, progressive taxes, duties, and imposts;
2. borrow on the credit of the United States and provide for the payment of its debts;
3. regulate commerce among the States, with foreign nations, and across digital and electronic networks;
4. coin and regulate money and provide for a sound and stable currency;
5. establish uniform rules of citizenship, naturalization, and immigration;
6. provide for the common defense and regulate the armed forces, subject to Article IX;
7. protect public health and respond to disease, disaster, and emergency, subject to Article IX;
8. protect the environment, conserve natural resources, and address threats to the climate;
9. regulate communications, technology, data, and the systems on which modern life depends;
10. build and maintain national infrastructure;
11. establish post offices, courts inferior to the Constitutional Court, and the institutions of integrity in Article X;
12. protect the rights declared in Article II by appropriate legislation; and
13. exercise such further powers as are reasonably required to carry out the foregoing, provided that no power of Congress may be used to violate this Constitution.
Section 5. Limits on Congress.
Congress shall pass no bill of attainder, no law punishing conduct after the fact, and no law granting a title of nobility or a privilege of office to any person. Congress shall not suspend the right to challenge a detention before a court except as Article IX permits. Every revenue and spending measure shall originate in and be subject to the open procedures of this Article.
Section 6. Procedure.
Each chamber sets its own rules consistent with this Constitution, provided that no rule may require more than a majority of those present and voting to enact ordinary legislation, to bring a measure to a vote, or to confirm an appointment. Supermajorities are required only where this Constitution expressly so provides. Every vote on the passage of legislation shall be recorded and published. The proceedings, records, and votes of Congress are public, except for narrowly defined matters of security under Article X, and the full text of every measure shall be public for a reasonable period before final passage.
Section 7. Integrity of Members.
Members of Congress serve the public and not themselves. Each member shall disclose their finances and interests publicly, shall not trade on or profit from nonpublic information obtained through office, shall not hold a financial interest that conflicts with their duties, and shall be bound by an enforceable code of ethics. Lobbying of Congress shall be transparent and disclosed.
Section 8. The Executive and Legislation.
A bill passed by both chambers is presented to the President, who within a fixed period shall sign it or return it with objections. A returned bill becomes law if again passed by a majority of each chamber. A bill not returned within the period becomes law. The President may not decline to spend funds that Congress has lawfully appropriated, nor refuse to execute a law in force.
Section 9. Removal of Officials.
Congress may remove the President, the Vice President, judges, and other officers for serious violation of this Constitution, abuse of office, corruption, or other grave misconduct. A charge is brought by a majority of the House of the People and tried by the Council of the Republic, with removal requiring a two-thirds vote of the Council. Removal bars the person from future office and does not shield them from ordinary criminal liability.
ARTICLE V — THE EXECUTIVE
Section 1. The President.
The executive power is vested in a President of the United States, who is head of state and head of government, charged to faithfully execute the laws and bound in all things by this Constitution.
Section 2. Election and Term.
The President is elected directly by the citizens of the United States, by national popular vote conducted through ranked choice with instant runoff so that the President holds a majority of the final count. The President serves a term of four years and may be elected to no more than two terms. A Vice President is elected with the President and succeeds to the office on the death, resignation, removal, or lasting incapacity of the President.
Section 3. Powers and Duties.
The President shall execute the laws, direct the executive departments, conduct foreign relations subject to the checks of this Constitution, command the armed forces subject to Article IX, and report regularly to Congress and the people on the state of the nation. The President exercises only the powers granted by this Constitution and by law, and possesses no inherent power to act against the law or the rights declared in Article II.
Section 4. Appointments.
The President appoints the principal officers of the executive and the judges of the courts, with the confirmation of the Council of the Republic, through a transparent process. Officers serve the public faithfully and may be removed by the President, except that officers charged with functions this Constitution makes independent may be removed only for cause defined by law.
Section 5. The Pardon Power.
The President may grant clemency for offenses against the United States, in writing and with reasons made public. The President may not pardon themselves. The President may not pardon any person for conduct undertaken on the President’s behalf, at the President’s direction, or to obstruct an investigation of the President. No pardon may issue for conduct connected to an ongoing impeachment of the person granting it.
Section 6. No Immunity from Law.
The President and every official are subject to the criminal and civil law. There is no immunity for criminal conduct committed in or out of office. Such limited immunity as may attach to official acts shall be defined by law, shall be no broader than the lawful conduct of office requires, and shall never shield a crime.
Section 7. Anti-Corruption.
The President, the Vice President, and principal officers shall place their financial interests beyond their own control or influence while in office, shall disclose their finances publicly, and shall accept no payment, benefit, or thing of value from any foreign state or from any private interest seeking to influence them. Violation is grounds for removal and for ordinary liability.
Section 8. Independence of Justice and Other Functions.
Decisions to investigate and prosecute individuals shall be made impartially, on the law and the evidence, and free from political direction by the President or any official, in either the pursuit or the protection of any person. The conduct of elections, the gathering of official statistics, and the governance of the currency shall likewise be insulated by law from political interference. These guarantees protect the public against the use of public power as a weapon.
Section 9. Succession and Incapacity.
The law shall provide an orderly line of succession. Where the President is unable to discharge the office, the Vice President shall act, and a fair procedure established by this Constitution and by law shall determine and review any claim of incapacity, with the matter resolved by Congress where it is disputed.
ARTICLE VI — THE JUDICIARY
Section 1. Vesting.
The judicial power of the United States is vested in a Constitutional Court and in such inferior courts as Congress establishes. The courts are independent, and their independence exists to serve the people and the law, not to place judges beyond accountability.
Section 2. The Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional Court consists of nine justices. Each justice is appointed for a single, nonrenewable term of eighteen years. The terms are staggered so that one term expires every two years, giving each elected President regular appointments and preventing any narrow period from capturing the Court. A justice whose term expires continues only until a successor takes office. Vacancies arising before a term’s end are filled for the remainder of that term.
Section 3. Appointment and Qualification.
Justices and judges are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Council of the Republic, following review by an independent nonpartisan body that assesses qualification and integrity. The process and the records of consideration are public.
Section 4. Judicial Power and Review.
The courts decide cases under this Constitution and the laws, and have the power and the duty to declare void any law or official act that violates this Constitution. The Constitutional Court is the final authority on the meaning of this Constitution, subject to the power of the people to amend it under Article XI.
Section 5. Independence and Accountability.
Judges are bound by an enforceable code of judicial ethics. They shall disclose their finances, shall recuse themselves where their impartiality could reasonably be questioned, and shall accept no gift or benefit that could influence them. A judge may be removed only through the procedure of Article IV, Section 9, for the grounds stated there. The compensation of judges may not be reduced during their service.
Section 6. Open Courts.
Court proceedings and decisions are public, and decisions of consequence shall state the reasons for them, except as narrowly required to protect a compelling interest such as the safety of a person or a child.
ARTICLE VII — FEDERALISM AND THE STATES
Section 1. Division of Authority.
Authority is shared between the United States and the States. The States retain all powers not granted to the United States nor denied to them by this Constitution, and they are guaranteed their existence and their republican self-government.
Section 2. Supremacy and the Floor of Rights.
This Constitution and the laws and treaties of the United States made under it are supreme. The rights declared in Article II are a floor. A State may extend greater protection to rights within its borders, but may not provide less, and may not discriminate against persons or deny them the equal protection this Constitution requires.
Section 3. Relations Among the States.
Each State shall give full faith and credit to the public acts and judicial proceedings of every other State, and shall not deny to the residents of other States the privileges it affords its own. Disputes among States are resolved by the courts of the United States.
Section 4. Local Self-Government.
The role of local and tribal governments in the life of the republic is recognized. The relationship of these governments to the States and to the United States is provided for by law, consistent with this Constitution.
ARTICLE VIII — PUBLIC FINANCE
Section 1. The Power of the Purse.
No money is drawn from the public treasury except by appropriation made by law. Every appropriation, and a regular and public accounting of all public revenue and expenditure, shall be available to the people.
Section 2. Fair Taxation.
Taxation shall be fair and may be progressive. No tax may be laid except by law enacted through the open procedures of Article IV. The power to tax does not include the power to punish belief, association, or expression.
Section 3. The Currency and the Central Bank.
The currency and the monetary system are administered by an independent central authority established by law, charged to maintain a sound and stable currency, insulated from political direction in its operations, and accountable to Congress and the people through transparent reporting.
Section 4. Independent Audit.
An independent Comptroller of the United States, appointed for a fixed term and removable only for cause, shall audit the accounts and operations of government, report publicly, and have full access to the records necessary to do so. No part of government is exempt from audit except as Article X narrowly permits for security, and even then subject to oversight.
Section 5. Against Corruption in Finance.
The public funds and credit of the United States shall be used only for public purposes. The diversion of public resources to private benefit, and self-dealing by any official in the handling of public money, are prohibited and are grounds for removal and for ordinary liability.
Section 6. The Gains of the Machine Age.
The productive systems of this age are built upon generations of public investment in knowledge, infrastructure, and law. Where extraordinary gains accrue from automation, artificial intelligence, or the exploitation of common resources and public data, the power of fair taxation under Section 2 reaches those gains, and Congress shall use it as needed to secure the general welfare, the transitions required by Article II, Section 16, and the fiscal foundation of the rights this Constitution declares.
Section 7. Concentration of Economic Power.
Concentrations of private economic power great enough to dominate markets, to dictate the conditions of common life, or to capture the institutions of government are dangers to liberty of the same kind this Constitution guards against in government itself. Congress shall have the power, and the continuing duty, to prevent, limit, and dissolve such concentrations, and no accumulation of wealth confers any exemption from law.
ARTICLE IX — NATIONAL SECURITY, WAR, AND EMERGENCY POWERS
Section 1. Civilian Control.
The armed forces are at all times subject to civilian authority and to this Constitution. No member of the armed forces owes obedience to an unlawful order, and the obligation of every officer runs to the Constitution and not to any person.
Section 2. The Power to Make War.
Only Congress may authorize the United States to engage in armed conflict. The President may direct the armed forces to repel an actual or imminent attack, but shall promptly report any such action to Congress and shall cease it unless Congress authorizes its continuation. An authorization to use force shall state its purpose and its limits, shall be limited in time, and shall expire unless renewed.
Section 3. Intelligence and Covert Action.
The agencies of intelligence and any covert action of the United States are subject to law and to continuous oversight by Congress and the courts. Secret action against the rights of persons is prohibited. Surveillance is governed by Article II, Section 8.
Section 4. Emergency Powers.
In a genuine emergency threatening the life of the nation, the President may declare an emergency and exercise such additional powers as a law enacted in advance specifically provides, subject to the following limits, which may not be waived:
1. the declaration shall state its grounds and its scope, and shall be public;
2. the declaration lapses within thirty days unless ratified by a majority of each chamber of Congress, and any continuation requires a renewed vote at intervals no greater than ninety days;
3. emergency powers shall be no greater and last no longer than the emergency requires, and shall be exercised under the supervision of the courts, which remain open;
4. the non-derogable rights of Article II, Section 22 may never be suspended;
5. no election may be postponed or canceled, and no chamber of Congress may be dissolved or prevented from meeting; and
6. no person may be detained indefinitely without charge, and the right to challenge a detention before a court is preserved.
Section 5. Catastrophic and Emerging Risks.
The security of the nation includes its security against catastrophe of its own making. Government shall maintain the continuing capacity to identify, assess, and prepare against risks that could inflict catastrophic or irreversible harm upon the people or upon future generations, including engineered pathogens, failures of critical and autonomous systems, and technologies whose power outruns human control. The development and deployment of technologies bearing such potential are subject to oversight, testing, and disclosure as Congress shall by law provide, and no claim of private ownership or trade secrecy shall place such risks beyond the reach of the law or the knowledge of the people’s representatives.
ARTICLE X — INTEGRITY, TRANSPARENCY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY
A government that hides its conduct cannot be governed by the people. Openness is the ordinary condition of public power, and secrecy is the narrow exception that must justify itself.
Section 1. The Right to Know.
Every person has the right of access to the records, meetings, and information of government, on equal terms with every other person. This right does not depend on a person’s profession, purpose, or affiliation, and government shall not create classes of requesters with greater or lesser access to public information. Where any cost is charged for fulfilling a request, it shall be reasonable and shall never function to deny access.
Section 2. Open Government.
Government shall conduct the public’s business in the open. Meetings at which public bodies deliberate or decide shall be open and noticed in advance. Records shall be kept, preserved, and made available promptly. Government shall publish its data and the information of public concern proactively, in usable form, without waiting to be asked.
Section 3. Limits of Secrecy.
Information may be withheld or classified only where disclosure would cause a specific and serious harm to national security, to an ongoing law-enforcement matter, to personal privacy, or to a comparably weighty interest defined by law. Every withholding shall be justified, shall be no broader than necessary, and shall be subject to challenge before a court that may examine the material itself. Classification shall carry an automatic expiration and shall be reviewed by an independent authority. There shall be no secret law: no rule that binds the public, and no legal interpretation by which government claims authority over persons, may be kept secret.
Section 4. Protection of Those Who Disclose Wrongdoing.
A person who in good faith discloses evidence of illegality, abuse of authority, danger to public health or safety, or corruption is protected from retaliation. The press and those who publish information of public concern are protected under Article II, Section 6, and government shall not punish the publication of truthful information lawfully obtained.
Section 5. Independent Integrity Institutions.
There shall be established by law, with secured independence and fixed terms:
1. an Anti-Corruption Authority empowered to investigate corruption and abuse of office throughout government;
2. one or more Inspectors with authority to examine the operations of government and report publicly; and
3. an Ombudsperson to receive and act on complaints from the public against government.
These institutions shall have access to the records and persons necessary to their work and shall report their findings to the public.
Section 6. Conduct of Officials.
Every official holds a public trust. Officials shall disclose their finances and interests, shall not use office for private gain, shall not accept benefits intended to influence them, and shall comply with enforceable standards of conduct. The revolving passage between public office and the private interests it regulates shall be subject to disclosure and to reasonable limits set by law.
ARTICLE XI — AMENDMENT AND GENERATIONAL RENEWAL
Section 1. The Living Constitution.
This Constitution may be amended, and is meant to be. It binds the people because they may change it. The procedures of this Article are the lawful and exclusive means of changing it.
Section 2. Ordinary Amendment.
An amendment may be proposed by:
1. a two-thirds vote of each chamber of Congress; or
2. a petition of citizens meeting a threshold set by law sufficient to show broad national support; or
3. a convention called for the purpose under Section 4.
A proposed amendment becomes part of this Constitution when ratified by a majority of citizens voting in a national referendum and by the legislatures or conventions of a majority of the States. An amendment that alters the protections of Article II, the structure of representation, or the procedures of this Article requires ratification by three-fifths in the national referendum.
Section 3. The Generational Review.
Because the earth belongs to the living, this Constitution shall be reviewed and renewed by each generation. Nineteen years after the ratification of this Constitution, and at intervals of nineteen years thereafter, a Constitutional Convention shall be convened automatically to examine the whole of this Constitution and to propose to the people its reaffirmation, its amendment, or its replacement.
Section 4. The Convention.
The Convention shall be composed so as to represent the people faithfully and to resist capture by any faction or interest. A portion of its delegates shall be selected by lot from among the citizens, as a representative assembly of the people, and a portion shall be elected by the proportional methods of Article III. The Convention shall deliberate in the open, shall have the resources and the time to do its work, and shall submit any proposal it adopts to the people. No proposal of the Convention takes effect except by ratification under Section 2 or, for a wholesale replacement, by a majority of three-fifths of citizens voting in a national referendum.
Section 5. Continuity.
This Constitution remains in full force until it is amended, reaffirmed, or replaced through the procedures of this Article. The duty of generational review does not cause this Constitution to lapse, and the republic shall never be left without a constitution in force.
Section 6. What May Not Be Abolished.
No amendment, convention, or referendum may abolish or impair:
1. the sovereignty of the people and their standing right to alter or replace their government;
2. the equal dignity and equal rights of all persons, or the prohibition of discrimination on the grounds named in Article II, Section 1;
3. free, fair, and frequent multiparty elections and the universal right to vote;
4. the rule of law and the independence of the courts;
5. the prohibition of perpetual or unaccountable rule by any person or group; or
6. the principle of generational renewal set out in this Article.
A change purporting to do any of these things is void.
ARTICLE XII — TRANSITION AND RATIFICATION
Section 1. Ratification.
This Constitution takes effect upon its ratification by a majority of citizens voting in a national referendum and by the conventions or legislatures of three-fourths of the States, and upon ratification it replaces the Constitution heretofore in force.
Section 2. Continuity of Law.
The laws, treaties, obligations, and judgments of the United States and of the States in force at ratification remain in force to the extent they are consistent with this Constitution, until amended or repealed. Debts and engagements entered into before ratification are as valid against the United States under this Constitution as before.
Section 3. Transition of Offices.
The persons holding office at ratification continue to serve until offices are filled under this Constitution, according to a schedule established for an orderly transition, so that the functions of government continue without interruption. The first elections and appointments under this Constitution shall be held as soon as practicable.
Section 4. Severability.
If any provision of this Constitution is held to be without effect, the remainder continues in force.
Section 5. The Living Generation.
This Constitution is adopted by the people now living, for themselves and as a trust for those who will come after, in the knowledge that it is not the last word but the present word, and in the expectation that each generation will examine it, improve it, and make it their own.
End of proposed text.
Read side by side, the two drafts show the difference between their traditions. The New Hampshire draft is conservative in the oldest sense: it keeps the frame of 1784 and repairs the rooms, because the frame contains its own renewal clause and seventeen conventions have kept it in repair. The federal draft is a rebuild, because the federal frame has no such clause, has proven nearly unamendable, and now protects arrangements no living majority chose: a frozen House and a sixty-fold Senate, inverted elections and unreviewable money. One needs a renovation. The other needs what 1787 got.
The legality: how each can lawfully be done
Here is the part that separates this project from a daydream. Both roads exist, in writing, right now.
The New Hampshire path is almost embarrassingly concrete. In November 2032, the question appears on every ballot whether anyone lifts a finger, because Article 100 commands the secretary of state to put it there. A simple majority of those voting on it calls the convention. Delegates are then elected from the same districts, in the same numbers, as the House: about four hundred Granite Staters, which is why an ordinary citizen here has a better chance of helping write a constitution than a citizen anywhere else in America. Three-fifths of those delegates must agree on any proposal. And then comes the wall that answers every catastrophist: nothing the convention produces means anything until two-thirds of the voters themselves approve it at the next November election. The convention proposes. Only the people dispose. A body chosen by the voters, checked by a supermajority of the voters, cannot run away with anything.
Two roads, both real. The Article 100 path and the two Article V routes. Graphic: GSR.
The federal path is harder, and honesty requires saying so plainly. The convention route has never been used in 237 years. But it has never been idle: scholars have identified 15 of the 27 amendments as proposed by Congress at least partly under the pressure of state convention applications, most famously the Seventeenth, after state legislatures began petitioning in the 1890s for a convention on direct election of senators and Congress moved rather than lose control. The threat of the convention is itself a working lever.
And beneath Article V lies the deeper precedent, the one this whole essay stands on. In February 1787, the Confederation Congress called a convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.” The Articles’ own Article XIII required that any alteration be confirmed by every state legislature. Unanimity. The delegates at Philadelphia did not revise. They wrote a new constitution, and in its Article VII they set their own ratification rule: conventions of nine states, not legislatures of thirteen. Richard Henry Lee stood up in Congress and said, correctly, that the convention had exceeded its commission. Congress heard him, and then unanimously transmitted the document to the states anyway, on September 28, 1787. Nine months later, on June 21, 1788, New Hampshire’s ratifying convention voted 57 to 46, the ninth state, the vote that made the Constitution law. The government we live under began operating on March 4, 1789. Every argument that a founding charter’s amendment rules are an unbreakable cage runs into this fact: the charter we revere was born by breaking one. The framers’ answer, argued openly in the ratification debates, was that the people are sovereign over their own constitutions, and that ratification by the people themselves, state by state and convention by convention, is the highest authority there is. That is not my theory. It is the founding.
The strongest objections, answered
The runaway convention. This is the fear that has beaten the question at the New Hampshire ballot box for forty years, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sneer. The answer is arithmetic. In New Hampshire, a convention’s proposals are waste paper without two-thirds of the voters, a threshold so high that of 64 amendments seventeen conventions have proposed, the people accepted 26 and binned the rest. Federally, any convention’s work faces ratification by 38 states; thirteen states can kill anything. My federal draft goes further and follows the 1787 model openly: it asks for ratification by popular conventions, state by state, and takes effect only where and when the people themselves say yes. A process that ends in a supermajority of the governed cannot run away from the governed. What it can do is force a public argument, which is precisely what its opponents fear, and precisely the point.
Madison’s stability. Madison told Jefferson that a constitution expiring every nineteen years would strip government of the reverence that age and habit supply, and pitch the country into a crisis at every deadline. He was right about the failure mode and wrong that expiry is the only design. Both my drafts keep the existing charter in force until the people replace or reaffirm it: the scheduled question without the scheduled cliff. New Hampshire has run this experiment since 1792, asking on a clock and usually answering no, and the sky over Concord has stayed where it belongs. The state’s two-to-one rejections are not evidence the mechanism is dangerous. They are evidence the people are careful custodians who can be trusted with their own constitution, which is the entire premise of self-government.
The entrenchment paradox. Both drafts contain a short list no future amendment may touch: equal citizenship and free elections, the right to know and the renewal question itself. If the earth belongs to the living, who am I to hand the next generation a locked box? The honest answer is that the clause does not entrench my preferences; it entrenches their power. Every item on the list is a precondition of the next generation’s power to decide everything else, including the power to throw out all my other work. I do not pretend the tension dissolves. I put it on the page and made the case anyway, because the alternative, a majority someday voting to end the counting of votes, is the one outcome a constitution exists to make impossible.
The “nobody wants this” objection. Here is what officeholders least like to say out loud: on the substance, Americans are not divided. Term limits for Congress draw 87 percent support in Pew’s polling, with majorities of both parties. A maximum age for Supreme Court justices draws 74 percent. Electing the president by national popular vote, 65 percent. More than 80 percent of Americans say elected officials do not care what people like them think, and as of September 2025 just 17 percent trust Washington to do what is right, in a country that answered 73 percent when the survey began in 1958. Not every reform here polls like that; enlarging the House does not, and I argue for it anyway. The honest picture is not a restless fringe against a contented majority. It is a supermajority that already knows the machinery is broken, governed by a machinery built not to hear them.
The call
Part First, Article 10 of the constitution this state has lived under since 1784 says that “whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered,” and every other remedy has failed, the people may reform the old government or establish a new one. New Hampshire did not bury that sentence in a museum. It kept the sentence, and then built a calendar to go with it: a standing appointment, every ten years, at which the people look at their own foundation and decide whether it still holds their weight. The appointment is set for November 2032. The delegates, if the people say yes, will be four hundred ordinary residents of this state. One of them could be you.
I hold no illusion that either of my drafts survives contact with a real convention intact, and no ambition that they should. Drafts are for improving. What I ask is harder and simpler: spend the six years between now and that ballot line doing what the founders did: arguing constitutional design out loud, in the press and at the town meeting. Read the documents. Mark them up. Send me what I got wrong, on the record, and I will publish it. Hamilton opened the Federalist with the question beneath all of this: whether human communities can establish their governments by thinking and choosing, or must forever take what force and accident hand them. New Hampshire has been answering him, on a schedule set in 1792, ever since. When the delegates of 1787 finished their work, Benjamin Franklin looked at the sun carved on the back of Washington’s chair and said he now knew it was “a rising and not a setting Sun.” That confidence was not a mood. It was earned, by people who trusted a free people to look at their own government with clear eyes and choose.
The country has now marked two hundred fifty years since the Declaration. Its signers did not toast a finished work; they toasted a beginning, and then they went home and wrote constitutions, this state having already written America’s first. The truest observance of the anniversary is theirs: not heirs at a viewing, but citizens at the desk. The sun has not gone down on that capacity. It is on the ballot, in this state, on a date already fixed. The only question, the one the calendar will ask whether we prepare or not, is whether we show up ready.
A companion video is planned for the Granite State Report channel: youtube.com/@GraniteStateReport. Subscribe to be notified when it posts.
Fact check
| # | Claim | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jefferson’s Sept. 6, 1789 letter to Madison calculated a generation at ~19 years and argued no constitution should outlive the generation that consented to it; Madison’s Feb. 4, 1790 reply rejected expiry on stability grounds. | VERIFIED | Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress (mtjbib004503); Founders Online, National Archives. |
| 2 | Elkins, Ginsburg & Melton studied 935 national constitutions (1789–2005) and estimated the average life expectancy of a constitution at 19 years. | VERIFIED | The Endurance of National Constitutions (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009); authors’ abstract. |
| 3 | The U.S. Constitution is the oldest written national constitution still in operation; the government under it began March 4, 1789 (237 years). | VERIFIED | National Archives; Library of Congress. |
| 4 | New Hampshire adopted the first state constitution, Jan. 5, 1776; the current constitution was adopted Oct. 31, 1783 and took effect June 2, 1784. | VERIFIED | N.H. official sources; Journal of Policy History (Cambridge); Wikipedia (corroborating). |
| 5 | In 1792 New Hampshire became the first state with a periodic constitutional-convention referendum — every 7 years, changed to 10 in 1964, when the legislature also gained the CACR amendment power. | VERIFIED | N.H. Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse; Ballotpedia. |
| 6 | New Hampshire has held 17 constitutional conventions, the most of any state (average: 5); the last was 1984. Conventions proposed 64 amendments; voters ratified 26. | VERIFIED | J.H. Snider, Union Leader op-ed (2022); Wikipedia, Constitution of New Hampshire. |
| 7 | The convention question has been on the N.H. ballot 36 times since 1799 and approved 15 times. | VERIFIED | N.H. Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse (newhampshire.concon.info). |
| 8 | Voters rejected the question 64.04–35.96 in 2012 and roughly two to one in 2022; the next scheduled question is 2032. No state has approved the question since Rhode Island in 1984 (convention held 1986). | VERIFIED | Ballotpedia (2022 question page; State constitutional conventions); Brennan Center State Court Report. |
| 9 | Article 100 mechanics as stated: legislative proposal by 3/5 of the entire membership of each house; convention question by majority of the General Court or by the secretary of state in the tenth year; majority of voters calls it; delegates chosen as House members are; convention proposes by 3/5 of its entire membership; every amendment requires approval by 2/3 of voters voting on it. | VERIFIED | N.H. Const. Pt. 2nd, Art. 100 (verbatim text via concon.info and Ballotpedia; nh.gov). |
| 10 | N.H. legislator pay is fixed at $200 per two-year term ($250 for presiding officers) by Part Second, Article 15. | VERIFIED | N.H. Const. Pt. 2nd, Art. 15; Wikipedia (corroborating). |
| 11 | Part First provisions cited: Art. 8 right to know (amended 1976; taxpayer standing added 2018), Art. 2-b information privacy (2018), Art. 2-a arms (1982), Art. 12-a eminent domain (2006), Art. 28-a unfunded mandates (1984), Art. 10 Right of Revolution (1784), quoted fragment verbatim. | VERIFIED | N.H. Const. Pt. 1st (nh.gov; Justia); Citizens Count. |
| 12 | On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire ratified the U.S. Constitution 57–46 as the ninth state, making its adoption official. | VERIFIED | Library of Congress; Constitution Annotated (Congress.gov); Avalon Project. |
| 13 | The Feb. 21, 1787 Confederation Congress resolution called the Philadelphia convention “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation” (quoted fragment verbatim); the vote was 8–1 with Connecticut opposed. | VERIFIED | Avalon Project (Report of Proceedings in Congress, Feb. 21, 1787); Center for the Study of the American Constitution, UW–Madison. |
| 14 | Articles of Confederation Art. XIII required unanimous state confirmation for any alteration; the new Constitution’s Art. VII set ratification at nine state conventions; Richard Henry Lee objected in Congress; Congress unanimously transmitted the Constitution to the states Sept. 28, 1787. | VERIFIED | Avalon Project; Founders’ Constitution (Univ. of Chicago); Constitution Annotated. |
| 15 | Article V: proposal by 2/3 of both houses or by a convention on application of 34 state legislatures; ratification by 38 states; the convention route has never been used. | VERIFIED | U.S. Const. art. V (National Archives transcript); National Constitution Center report. |
| 16 | Scholars have identified 15 of the 27 amendments as proposed by Congress at least partly under the pressure of state convention applications, including the Seventeenth after 1890s state petitions for direct election of senators. | VERIFIED | National Constitution Center, “Article V Constitutional Conventions” report; corroborated by Wikipedia’s sourced summary. |
| 17 | The 27th Amendment was proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1992, a 202-year wait; the first ten amendments were ratified as one package in 1791; 27 amendments total. | VERIFIED | National Archives. |
| 18 | The House has been capped at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929; the average district now exceeds 760,000 people. | VERIFIED | U.S. House Office of the Historian; U.S. Census Bureau (2020 apportionment). |
| 19 | Wyoming (587,618) and California (39,431,263), July 1, 2024 Census estimates, hold the same two Senate seats, a per-person disparity exceeding sixty to one. | VERIFIED | U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. |
| 20 | The Electoral College installed the national popular-vote loser in 2000 and 2016. | VERIFIED | National Archives, Electoral College results. |
| 21 | IMF (Jan. 2024): nearly 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, about 60% in advanced economies; roughly half of exposed jobs face AI performing key tasks, with lower demand, wages, and hiring. Goldman Sachs estimated the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs at risk. | VERIFIED | IMF blog and staff discussion note “Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work” (Georgieva, Jan. 14, 2024); Goldman Sachs figure as reported by CNBC and others. |
| 22 | Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts, Q1 2026: the top 1% of households hold 31.6% of U.S. household net worth; the bottom 50% hold 2.5%. | VERIFIED | Federal Reserve DFA via FRED series WFRBST01134 and WFRBSB50215 (retrieved September 15, 2026). |
| 23 | Gilens & Page (2014), analyzing 1,779 policy issues: economic elites and organized business interests have substantial independent influence on U.S. policy; average citizens’ preferences showed a non-significant, near-zero independent effect (“near-zero” quoted from the study). | VERIFIED | Gilens & Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics,” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014), Cambridge. |
| 24 | ConVal v. State: on July 1, 2025, the N.H. Supreme Court held 3–2 that base adequacy aid (about $4,100 per pupil) is unconstitutionally low, affirmed the $7,356.01 conservative minimum threshold as guidance, and reversed the order for immediate payment; the gap implies more than $500 million per year; Justice Nadeau’s dissent counted eleven school-funding cases since 1993 without a finding of compliance. | VERIFIED | N.H. Bulletin (July 1, 2025); Concord Monitor; Education Law Center; Keene Sentinel. |
| 25 | Rand v. State: in August 2025 Judge Ruoff held total adequacy funding and the varying local property-tax scheme unconstitutional; reconsideration was denied Jan. 26, 2026; in February 2026 the state appealed, seeking to overturn longstanding precedent (the Claremont line). | VERIFIED | N.H. Bulletin (Aug. 20, 2025); Education Law Center case update (2026). |
| 26 | Claremont II (1997) established the state’s duty to fund an adequate education through taxes uniform in rate. | VERIFIED | N.H. Supreme Court, Claremont line of cases, as summarized by the parties and press above. |
| 27 | Property taxes supply about 63% of all state and local tax revenue in New Hampshire — a greater share than any other state; N.H. ranked 48th in per-person state aid to local governments (2022); the lowest-income households pay an effective property-tax rate roughly three times that of the highest-income households (ITEP analysis). | VERIFIED | NHFPI report as covered by Concord Monitor, NHPR, and N.H. Bulletin (April 2026). |
| 28 | A $500,000 house owes about $1,310 a year in property tax in Hart’s Location and about $18,270 in Charlestown. | VERIFIED | Concord Monitor analysis (April 2026). |
| 29 | N.H.’s state share of public-education funding was the smallest in the nation (29%, 2022 data). | VERIFIED | NHFPI, as reported by the Keene Sentinel. |
| 30 | N.H. Housing’s 2023 needs assessment: 23,500 more units needed then and 90,000 more by 2040; median single-family sale price hit a record $540,000 in June 2024, requiring about 49% of median household income; N.H.’s median age of 43.4 ties Vermont as second-oldest behind Maine. | VERIFIED | NHFPI housing fact sheet (2025); N.H. Housing Statewide Needs Assessment; Keene Sentinel/NHFPI (Census data). |
| 31 | Held v. Montana: on Dec. 18, 2024, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed 6–1 that the state constitution’s right to a “clean and healthful environment” includes a stable climate system, the nation’s first constitutional climate case to reach trial. | VERIFIED | Montana Supreme Court opinion (McGrath, C.J.), as reported by the Daily Montanan, Stateline, and others. |
| 32 | Franklin’s “rising and not a setting Sun” remark at the close of the 1787 convention (quoted fragment). | VERIFIED | Madison’s Notes of Debates, Sept. 17, 1787. |
| 33 | Eric Herr argued in April 2026 that New Hampshire should treat the run-up to 2032 as a period of Federalist-style public constitutional debate. | ATTRIBUTED | Eric Herr, column, Laconia Daily Sun (April 2026) — cited for the author’s argument, not as established fact. |
| 34 | The N.H. State House (opened 1819) is the oldest U.S. state capitol in which the legislature still meets in its original chambers. | VERIFIED | N.H. Historical Society; N.H. General Court. |
| 35 | Pew Research (Sept. 2025 survey, published Dec. 2025): 17% of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time, among the lowest readings in nearly seven decades; the 2024 reading was 22%; the first reading, in 1958, was 73%. | VERIFIED | Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2025.” |
| 36 | Pew (Sept. 2023): 87% favor congressional term limits (56% strongly; 12% opposed); 74% favor a maximum age for Supreme Court justices; 65% favor deciding presidential elections by national popular vote; only 29% favor enlarging the House. | VERIFIED | Pew Research Center, “How Americans View Proposals to Change the Political System.” |
| 37 | More than 80% of Americans say elected officials don’t care what people like them think (Pew, April 2024). | VERIFIED | Pew Research Center, trust-in-government topic reporting. |
| 38 | RAND (Price, 2025 working paper extending Price & Edwards 2020): with the more even income growth of 1945–1975, the bottom 90% of workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone; the cumulative gap from 1975 through 2023 is about $79 trillion. | VERIFIED | RAND Corporation, WR-A516-2 (2025). |
| 39 | Michigan’s MiDAS automated system adjudicated unemployment-fraud cases without human review (2013–2015); about 40,000 people were falsely accused; an internal state review found a 93% error rate among cases examined; penalties ran to 400%; the Michigan Supreme Court allowed constitutional damages claims (2022) and a $20 million settlement was approved in January 2024. | VERIFIED | Michigan Attorney General (settlement release); Michigan Public; Bridge Michigan; Wisconsin Law Review. |
| 40 | Two days before the Jan. 23, 2024 N.H. primary, thousands of voters received an AI-cloned Biden-voice robocall urging them to hold their votes for November, spoofing a local Democrat’s number — widely identified as the first deepfake used in American national politics. The FCC finalized a $6 million fine (Sept. 2024); Lingo Telecom paid $1 million; the N.H. attorney general indicted the consultant on 26 counts; a Belknap County jury acquitted him of all state charges in June 2025. | VERIFIED | N.H. Department of Justice; FCC enforcement release; NHPR; AP/WBUR. |
| 41 | UNEP’s first global environmental rule of law assessment counted 150 countries with environmental protection or the right to a healthy environment in their constitutions (as of 2017); the UN General Assembly declared a healthy environment a human right on July 28, 2022. | VERIFIED | UN Environment Programme; UN General Assembly resolution coverage (UNEP). |
| 42 | Franklin Roosevelt proposed a “second Bill of Rights” in his Jan. 11, 1944 State of the Union message; “necessitous men are not free men” is quoted verbatim from that address. | VERIFIED | The American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara), full text. |
| 43 | The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776; this piece publishes during its 250th-anniversary year, the Semiquincentennial (the Declaration’s 250th fell on July 4, 2026). New Hampshire’s first constitution (Jan. 5, 1776) preceded the Declaration by six months. | VERIFIED | GovInfo, America’s 250th Anniversary; Journal of Policy History (Cambridge); National Archives. |
| 44 | Rand appeal, recusal record, verified September 15, 2026: plaintiffs moved to recuse Chief Justice MacDonald and Justices Will, Donovan, and Gould over prior work for the state against school-funding plaintiffs (MacDonald, Will, Donovan) and as counsel to the state GOP while it urged overturning Claremont (Gould); the court declined to suspend its recusal rule on April 28, 2026; by June 5, 2026 all four had declined to recuse; on August 31, 2026 the plaintiffs renewed the request as to MacDonald and Will, citing the state’s new brief. | VERIFIED | N.H. Supreme Court order (June 5, 2026); InDepthNH (Apr. 8, Apr. 28, June 5, and Aug. 31, 2026); Union Leader; NH Journal. |
| 45 | In its August 2026 brief in Rand, the N.H. Attorney General’s Office asked the Supreme Court to overturn Claremont I (1993) and Claremont II (1997), arguing that the funding duty read into Part II, Article 83’s command to “cherish” the schools “finds no basis in the text”; that any such duty is shared with municipalities; that school funding is a non-justiciable political question; that local education taxes are not state taxes; and that taxpayer plaintiffs lack standing. Quoted fragments are from the state’s brief as reported. | VERIFIED | N.H. Bulletin (Ethan DeWitt, Aug. 21, 2026); Concord Monitor (Aug. 17, 2026). |
| 46 | In March 2026, Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed House Bill 1815, amending statute to make provision of an adequate education a “shared responsibility” between the state and school districts. | VERIFIED | N.H. Bulletin (Aug. 21, 2026), citing HB 1815 (2026) as enacted. |
| 48 | Chief Justice MacDonald and Justice Will recused themselves from the ConVal appeal (MacDonald as the attorney general who defended the case; Will as the state’s lead counsel, having appeared for the State in ConVal I as Solicitor General); the state’s Rand brief asks the court to overrule ConVal II; on Aug. 31, 2026 the plaintiffs renewed recusal requests as to both. The Supreme Court stated that the chief justice’s medical providers confirmed he is not able to work at present. | VERIFIED | Justice Will’s June 5, 2026 order (courts.nh.gov); InDepthNH (June 5 and Aug. 31, 2026), reporting the court’s statement. |
| 49 | Natalie LaFlamme, counsel for the Rand plaintiffs: “It’s a state duty, and we’ve all understood it to be so” (quoted fragment; she added “for the last 40 years”). | ATTRIBUTED | Interview with the N.H. Bulletin (Ethan DeWitt, Aug. 21, 2026). |
| 47 | Briefing schedule in the Rand appeal: plaintiffs’ response due Oct. 6, 2026, with the case likely fully briefed by November and oral argument possible in December, January, or February. | ATTRIBUTED | Natalie LaFlamme, counsel for the Rand plaintiffs, to the N.H. Bulletin (Aug. 21, 2026) — cited as counsel’s estimate, not a court order. |
Editor’s note. Both proposed constitutions are the author’s own drafts, offered as works of public argument and clearly labeled as such on every page; that involvement is disclosed at the top of this piece. Every factual claim about the current constitutions, the litigation, and the data was verified against primary or authoritative sources before publication; see the fact-check table. The one row marked ATTRIBUTED reflects an opinion column, cited for what its author argued. This analysis rests on documentary and published sources and has not yet been tested against a live, on-the-record New Hampshire constitutional-law source; responses from any such source who goes on the record will be published in full. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.
Granite State Report is independent New Hampshire journalism, published from Northfield. Tips and documents: granitestatereport@gmail.com · (603) 931-9264.
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