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I think the votes of dead people should count. They should count not because we are trying to please them, but becasue the interests they had are the same interests we have.

Are they though? I think our interests now are quite a lot different than those of Jefferson and Madison. COnsider that we live in a world where the US is a superpower with nuclear weapons, where our economy is heavily industrialized and tightly integrated with the world economy, where machines exist which can, with ease, collect up every scrap of data that exists on a person within seconds, where the disparity between the arms used for hunting and the arms used for war have grown by many orders of magnitude.

The founding fathers lived in a time when America was a rogue colony of a much greater state. Devestation on the order of a nuclear weapon took decades not seconds. The ability to invade privacy was weak and required great effort and time. Where the black powder musket was the armament of choice for both hunter and soldier (granted with soldiers using horse drawn cannon for heavy weapons).

The issues confronting us have very little at all to do with the issues that they faced, I think.

They coud have just written the constitution with a sunset provision set to expire when they died, but they wrote the constitution out with an eye for the future minorities.

But did any of them imagine the constitution lasting this long or the US growing to such a size? I very much doubt it. Jefferson after all said "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion".

If you do not think the votes of people who died should matter than why do you think we should have a constitution? Why not live under the law of a simple majority?

I think it provides a good framework, a starting point for us. But that's all. It is the alpha, not the omega. It's up to us to take that starting point and use it to make the government work for our times. When and as the constitution becomes too removed from our lives we should amend it so that future generations have a better starting point.

So by it's very nature a constitutional democracy counts the votes of dead people.

Nicely put. Let me say that I have no problem listening to the words of the dead. What I object to is being bound to them. The dead may advise but not rule, if you will.

A document derives it's meaning from what the author intended it to mean; the purpose of writing is for the author to convey a certain meaning to his audience.

Short story- I promise it connects to the matter at hand

When I was younger (and to some extent to the current day) I rather liked the musician Seal. One thing that annoyed me about his albums, though, was that he didn't include lyrics. Turns out that was purposeful, not negligent. In one of his first albums he included in the liner notes a quick explanation. Suffice it to say that he felt that providing "official" lyrics was a disservice to the audiece because what mattered was not what he said but what you heard.

If you heard the "wrong" words but they had meaning for you then that was much more important than hearing the right words and not getting a personal meaning out of them.

At first I was annoyed by this choice on his part, I felt like I had a right to know what he was telling me in his songs, but over time i grew to respect it more and more. The personal meaning is more important.

Why?

Because life is about our personal experiences and what we learn from them or how we deal with them. It isn't about having someone else give us wisdom. That doesn't happen. You learn it yourself or you remain ignorant.

So when you say "a document derives it's meaning from what the author intended it to mean" I have to vigorously disagree. A document derives its meaning from what we see in it (including, but not exclusively, the author).

You can certainly interpret the author to mean what you like, but if you're going to do that, why use his writing in the first place, why not just give the message that your created interpretation gives.

Because the formulations of other can help us to break out of our normal thought patterns.

Anotehr short story- I sometimes use Tarot cards; not for divination, but as a stimulus to creativity. I'll lay out the cards in essentially random patterns and see what if any patterns leap out to me sparking ideas for creative writing. I do this because the tarot deck I have has some vibrant images on them that lend themselves to various interpretations. There's nothing magic in the cards, it is just a stimulus to help me look into myself.

Why shouldn't living people come up with our own constitution every generation?

I'd actually be in favor that, although the political process of it would likely be brutal. In order to do it you'd need a much smaller country (which I also favor, I think the US should split up into 3-8 smaller nations).