This is not a political website. It is a problem-solving website - a forum for Americans who are frustrated with our country's deterioration, and the complete failure of our professional political class to do anything about it.

There is nothing complicated about our Constitution. It establishes a Federal Republic with a weak central government. Power within the central government is distributed amongst three equal branches, and all powers not granted at the Federal level are reserved for the States or the Citizens. How has something so simple become so dysfunctional?

Nobody, regardless of their politics, can credibly assert that the #1 reason is anything other than the fact that our Federal government has vastly exceeded its Constitutional mandate. Simply put, it has become a jack of all trades, a master of none, and a failure at most.

That is not to say that "all government is bad" or even that "the government that governs best, governs least". We need our central government to not only do those things the Constitution calls on it to do, but to do them extremely well. Military defense, foreign affairs, trade regulation, naturalization - these functions are all essential to the success of any nation, and are ones that cannot and should not be delegated to 50 uncoordinated state governments with conflicting interests and agendas.

The Constitution was not perfect as written, but its imperfections must not be used as an excuse to ignore it. At its inception, it provided for its own modification, and it is significant that such modifications have been made only seventeen times in nearly 240 years - and even those seventeen instances (the Bill of Rights being considered a single "instance" since all ten amendments were ratified at one time) don't significantly expand the power of the central government beyond what the original Constitution provided for, most addressing either citizens' rights, voting rights, or administrative matters.

Why, then, is the Federal government so powerful? Why is its influence so wide-reaching? Why have the states been relegated to mere executors of Washington DC's will? The answers are few and simple:

• Congress' self-serving, power-usurping interpretation of the Necessary and Proper and Commerce clauses;
• Congress' subsequent forfeiture of its newly-seized power to the Executive Branch, and that Branch's eagerness to accept and exercise said transfer of power;
• the Supreme Court's unfortunate reluctance to uphold our Federalist distribution of power or maintain our Federal balance of power

The following links are our ideas only, presented not as definitive solutions to these root causes, but as baselines from which to provoke discussion, which, we hope, will energize our fellow countrymen to finally demand accountability from our ruling class, or else replace them with elected officials who respect our system of government and the citizens they are accountable to.