Our founding fathers built a system of government based on the idea that we didn’t need kings. We were going to be a republic — citizens governing themselves through representatives, with structures designed to constrain concentrated power. And they made the system flexible enough to change when it needed to.

What they didn’t count on was the corporate global empire.

In their time, the system was relatively simple. American companies paid American taxes. The companies operated in America, sold to Americans, employed Americans, and contributed to the country they did business in. That was the deal, and it didn’t need much enforcement because there wasn’t really another option.

They also didn’t fully understand how much a company could one day influence Congress. The men in Congress and the Senate weren’t all amateurs — many were lawyers, planters, and merchants who spent significant time in public life. But they weren’t a permanent political class funded by an industry of professional influencers. They remained economically tied to local communities — their farms, their law practices, their businesses. They went home between sessions and lived under the laws they passed. They weren’t sitting in Washington waiting for lobbyists to write their next paycheck, because that industry didn’t exist yet.

Today the world looks different. Corporations have figured out how to dodge and dance around the deal. A company claims to be from Ireland — or the Cayman Islands, or Bermuda — and pays almost nothing to the country whose customers it relies on. Apple sells $200 billion worth of products to Americans every year and routes the profit through Ireland to pay a fraction of what a small American business pays.

And Congress doesn’t stop it — not because every member is corrupt, but because Congress increasingly responds to institutional funding pressures that ordinary citizens cannot realistically match. Most members are professional politicians who spend their days raising money for the next election, and the money comes from the corporations they’re supposed to be regulating. The founders built a republic. We’ve drifted into something else.

What that something is, I’m not entirely sure. Claude and I are going to work through it together across this series. A note on how this works: I bring the ideas, the experience of living and working in this economy, and the questions about why things are the way they are. Claude pulls the data, runs the math, and pressure-tests whether what I’m proposing actually holds up. Where my instincts were wrong, he pushed back. Where the numbers didn’t work, we adjusted. What you’re reading is the result of that back-and-forth — ideas from someone who’s lived in the real economy, proved out with better data and math than I could do alone.

What’s clear from that work is that the shift has been picking up speed for the last twenty years, and both parties have been fighting over which version of it wins — not whether to reverse it.

Here’s the interesting part. It can be solved. The Constitution itself gives us the tools. The founders built in the amendment process specifically because they knew the country would face problems they couldn’t predict. They didn’t expect us to live under the original document forever — they expected us to use it, improve it, and adapt it when concentrated power started threatening the republic. That’s what the amendment process is for.

But it requires a first step, and it’s a hard one. Congress and the Senate have to stop responding primarily to corporate funding pressure and start responding to the people again. Until that happens, nothing else gets fixed — because every reform that benefits working families gets killed in committee by the same members who depend on corporate money to keep their seats.

The ideas we worked through to fix that first step look something like this. I’ll preview them here and dedicate a later post to each one in detail. Term limits — three terms in the House, two in the Senate, no exceptions. Higher salaries for members so honest service pays well, paired with a generous pension for those who leave cleanly. A ten-year lobbying ban after leaving office. A ban on individual stock trading by members and their families. Reversing Citizens United through constitutional amendment so corporations can’t buy elections through unlimited spending. Public financing of campaigns through small-donor matching, so candidates depend on their voters, not on billionaires.

None of these reforms are new ideas. Other countries do versions of them and they function. The constitutional path exists through Article V. The math works. These problems are difficult, but they are structurally solvable.

What makes it hard isn’t math or constitutional design. It’s that the corporate side will fight every piece of it tooth and nail. The capital flight arguments, the constitutional litigation, the political durability question across multiple election cycles — those are the real obstacles, not the underlying logic. Even though corporations would still be profitable under the new rules — they’d just be profitable in proportion to what they actually contribute, instead of profitable by capturing the government that’s supposed to regulate them — the fight to get there will be enormous.

That’s the fight ahead. And the rest of this series lays out, one plank at a time, what the platform looks like once that first fight is won.

The Modern Constitutionalists · A Constitutional Republicans Series · Post 2 · Next: Where We Drifted