Foundational Tenets

These are the basic principles that make the exercise of state power legitimate and serve as the guiding principles for the draft. Like everything in this process, they are open to constructive debate.

1. All state power originates with the people.
   The state holds power in trust, not in its own right. Every office, institution and authority exists because the people have delegated power, and that power is exercised only under the terms of that delegation.

2. Human dignity is inalienable.
   The rights of any single individual cannot be commuted by the will of the majority. Popular sovereignty is not a licence for a tyranny of the majority. A constitutional order without safeguards offers no protection against power seized lawfully and then entrenched.

3. Every natural person holds the same rights as every other.
   No entity — corporate, financial, or institutional — holds the rights of a person by analogy. (This tenet does not disturb the distinct political status of sovereign nations within the United States, which rests on treaty and nationhood rather than on individual privilege.)

4. Concentration of power in any form is a constant danger.
   As the steward of the people, the state has the duty to prevent the excess accumulation of power by any individual, entity or group. Regardless of whose hands hold it, power that gathers beyond effective challenge becomes unaccountable. A constitution that guards only against state power, while economic, informational and platform power concentrate unchecked loses substance.

5. The state is bound by law.
   Accountability requires enforceable constraint. Where a rule depends on the restraint of the person it constrains, it is not a rule.

6. Power should sit as close as practicable to the people it affects.
   Authority should be exercised at the most local level capable of exercising it effectively. Higher levels only act where lower ones genuinely cannot. Distance between a decision and its consequences is itself a form of concentrated power.

7. Elections are central to the expression of popular will, but not the whole of it.
   Free and fair elections are necessary and non-negotiable, but they are not sufficient. Deliberation, citizen assemblies, direct petition and other means of participation are legitimate parts of how a people governs itself. A constitutional order should provide for them in its design. 

8. A constitution must remain amendable.
   A fundamental law that cannot in practice be changed ceases to be a framework for self-government and becomes an inheritance imposed on the living by the dead. Hurdles for amendment are a legitimate safeguard; impossibility is a defect