Editor's Note:
Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and contributor to CNN en Español.
His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America.
Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.
The opinions expressed in this comment are solely yours.
See more op-ed articles at CNNE.com/opinion.
(CNN Spanish) -
Chile is about to enter a constitutional process.
Chavismo in Venezuela no longer uses the Constitution promulgated in 1999 and they want another and that is why they created the National Constituent Assembly in 2017.
The English, who invented constitutionalism, have no written Constitution.
The Israelis agreed to draft one but have found no peace and continue to operate with general principles that were supposedly provisional when the State of Israel was created.
In the United States there is absurdity, or so it seems to me, with legislators who are aware of what the "founding fathers" supposedly had in mind in that summer of 1787 when they drafted the Constitution in force until today.
At that time, for example, slavery existed, women could not vote, the country was less than a third the size it is today, and barely 3.9 million inhabitants.
That is about 1.2% of its current population.
Perhaps the most sensible thing is to restrict the Constitutions to the dogmatic part, that is, to the principles and values that encourage society to write them, but leaving everything else to ordinary legislation, so that it is easy to change the laws.
That, or ask society every 15 or 20 years if they want to tweak the Constitution, write a new one, or keep it intact.
Of course, forbidding legislators to use constitutions to make a demagogic "wish" list.
Because it seems that it is not convenient for the Constitution to be used to establish the “right” of people to have a “decent” home or job.
Those are reasonable aspirations, but not "rights" that lead us all to illegality, by not being able to fulfill them.