In a few weeks, I am going to attend a Great Conversations program in Helena, Mont., wherein people sign up for dozens of conversation tables according to their interests and tastes. One table might be about the "Buffalo Commons" idea and another about "The Best Movie of All Time." The assignment I received today is to lead a discussion about "The Next American Constitution." I need your help.

Thomas Jefferson believed that we ought to tear up the U.S. Constitution once every 19 or so years, on the principle that "the earth belongs to the living not the dead." This splendid radical idea always gets a negative reaction when I try to make the case for it. Most Americans shudder as they try to imagine what a Constitutional Convention would look like in an age of tabloid 24-7 media, lobbying groups with virtually infinite funds and sophistication, and a public that is more interested in NASCAR than natural rights, more informed about Britney Spears than Great Britain.

Fair enough. But for the next few minutes, please ask yourself what you would change in the American Constitution if you had the power and wisdom of Solon, or for that matter Alexander Hamilton.

Here are a few possibilities.

The Electoral College. The Electoral College was created to serve as a filtering mechanism. By the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, many of the founders believed we needed to step back from the democratic principles of 1776 and create a more conservative social compact. Most of the founders had little, if any, respect for the common people of the country, Alexander Hamilton's "rabble, the beast." They were uncomfortable letting the people elect their own president, so they created the Electoral College to serve as a kind of College of Cardinals. The people would be permitted to elect electors, but the electors would have the authority to elect any president they chose. The system has broken down several times, and it makes thoughtful people wonder if they really live in a democratic republic. Perhaps we could clarify its purposes or just eliminate it altogether.

Impeachment. In my opinion, the 1787 impeachment (removal) mechanism is one of the principal flaws of the Constitution. There is a reason why there never has been a successful impeachment of a president or a Supreme Court justice. The bar was set too high. Either the number of votes needed for conviction needs to be lowered to something below a two-thirds majority in the Senate or (more sensibly) the criteria for removal should be widened beyond "high crimes and misdemeanors." Perhaps it should be possible to impeach a president for "gross ineptitude" or "unconscionable stubbornness" or "fundamentally losing the confidence of the American people." If we haven't successfully impeached a single president in a run of 43 - a list that includes James Buchanan, Millard Fillmore, Richard Nixon and, er … Warren Harding - clearly the bar has been set too high.

The Second Amendment. I know we live in gun country (at the start of hunting season) and I am not, I repeat, not a gun critic. But given the almost incredible development in weapons technology since 1787, it might be useful to debate and clarify our national attitude toward gun access. After all, in Madison's time a high-tech weapon was a single-shot musket that took a minimum of 25 seconds to reload. Using such weapons (the weapons of the Second Amendment), the killers at Columbine High School (April 20, 1999) and Virginia Tech (April 16, 2007) would have been able to squeeze off one or at most two rounds before they were overpowered by their peers. At some point, technological developments represent a difference no longer of degree but of kind. It might be interesting to decide how the country really feels about guns as the 21st century begins. And where are our militias?

War powers. The founders, who lived in a 3 mph world, determined to muzzle the dogs of war and prevent presidential mania by insisting that the power to declare war lay exclusively with Congress, in fact, in the House of Representatives. Even Jefferson, the pacifist third president, found it impossible to respond to the rapidly changing world situation while wearing such a constitutional strait jacket. After World War II, the executive branch has effectively swallowed up the Constitution's war powers, irrespective of the occasional charade of the president seeking congressional authorization for war. Given that we now live in a world that travels at 186,000 miles per second, or at least at the speed of a ballistic missile, we ought to craft a new war powers doctrine that gives the president the constitutional flexibility he or she needs, at the same time that it provides Congress enough authority to prevent executive recklessness. It won't be easy, but the present arrangement is disingenuous and dangerous.

Judicial term limits. As you know, judicial officers, once appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, serve for life on "good behavior." Though the principle of judicial independence makes sense, life tenure was a bad idea even in the early national period. Of life-tenured judges, Jefferson famously said, "few die and none resign." In Jefferson's time, in an age before antibiotics, life expectancy was a little more than half of what it is today. Today, a man or woman appointed in their 40s can expect to live (and therefore serve on the bench) for 40, maybe even 50 years. That's too much power too long in the hands of one individual. It might be worth setting a 20- or 30-year cap on judicial terms, or having a vote of confidence or no confidence every 15 years or so.

It might be useful, too, to take advantage of a constitutional revision to remove some things that now are regarded as embarrassments. Although slavery is never mentioned by name in the Constitution, it is addressed (and perpetuated) eight times in the course of the document. The most notorious of these is the three-fifths clause, which counted every five Negro slaves as three for the purposes of apportionment and representation. At the moment of its crafting, this was a necessary compromise. That was 220 years ago. Now it's a blot on our national honor.

If we assembled a new Constitutional Convention, we might wish it to take up such vexing and intractable issues as abortion, the future of the public lands of the American West, access to health care in an advanced industrial society, America's participation in international bodies like the U.N. and the International Courts of Justice, women's rights and the sovereignties of Indian tribes, which Jefferson's cousin, the great Chief Justice John Marshall, called "domestic dependent nations."

There are some constitutional theorists who believe the "Great Compromise" of July 16, 1787, apportioning House seats by population, but guaranteeing every state, no matter how small or lightly populated, an equal number of senators, is a violation of the principle of one person one vote, and that it permits determined minorities in the Senate to hold up the progress of a nation (a world power) of 300 million people. The famous compromise gives little North Dakota, with only 642,000 people, as much power in the Senate as California, with its whopping 38 million people. In other words, from a Senatorial point of view, each North Dakotan has as much power as 59 Californians.

As a proud resident of the fourth least populated state, I would prefer now to change the subject. And please understand, I am not advocating gun control.

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@aol.com.)