Memories of the 28th Century

I was thinking abut the Supreme Court decision regarding presidential immunity. Until quite recently, everyone understood that after leaving office, a former president was just another citizen, and no immunity followed the former president. I believe that understanding is obvious in the Constitution, but some people can't read as well as everyone used to.
Since reading comprehension has deteriorated so much, it might be a good idea to rewrite the Constitution is seven simpler terms. I fend the Constitution extremely easy to read and it is unambiguous. I believe that the writers of it thought about eliminating ambiguity, but some of the sentence structures seem to confuse some people.
Maybe we could put everything into simple or compound sentences, and instead of having series of parallel sentences, we could convert all of those into simple sentences. For example:
If a sitting president commits a crime while in office, then he may not be prosecuted until he shall not be president. A sitting president will stop being president when his term ends, or after he will be removed from office by impeachment by the House of Representatives and conviction on the impeachment by the Senate. In either case, after leaving office a former president will have no special rights or privileges; he shall be an ordinary citizen, unless he gains another office by election or appointment.
The Constitution would end up being considerably longer, because it was written tersely, and it would take a lot of words in simple sentences to make it even less ambiguous. Let's take Article 1 Section 1 as an example. To make the present “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” completely unambiguous, we would have to start by defining “all legislative power”. That means that the only laws rules, regulations, opinions, or other directions to people that can be enforced by any branch, department, or other organization established by the United States can be made only by votes of the House of Representatives and the Senate, AKA the Congress.

In addition to making it perfectly clear, we could add something that wasn't included in the original, because it was so obvious. Alas, some people need to be beaten over the head with the obvious, but a statement of the nature of the sovereignty and the type of government would be a nice addition. Something along the lines of: The United States of America is an alliance of sovereign republics. Sovereignty is the right and power to rule a place. A republic is a government that is owned and operated by its citizens using elected representatives as their agents of government, and an alliance is an agreement among sovereign entities allowing some decisions to be made by the governing body of the alliance, rather than the sovereign states that make up the alliance. That is about as clear as mud, but I think it covers most points.

Failing to define the relevant terms and conditions makes it possible for people to use their personal interpretations, and that can be a disaster.

Another matter that can be clearly defined is the rights and obligations of the people. The Bills of Rights is nice, but it doesn't go into enough detail, and it should start with a statement that government exists to provide a legal framework in which people can live their lives as they wish, as long as they respect the rights of others. Government does not exist to tell people how to live their lives, unless they infringe on the lives of other people.

The original Constitution assumes that people have read and understood a variety of documents that led to the Constitution, including the Declaration of Independence. And that document is especially relevant to the second Amendment, because that guarantees the right of the people to be armed with weapons with which they might overthrow the government, if it becomes destructive of their rights.

Clarifying the Constitution would also make it clear that all citizens have equal right before the law, regardless of anything else, and it could also make the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth clearer. The intention of the Citizenship Clause was to make it clear that people who were born to lawful residents were citizens, but it wasn't made clear, so that children of people who criminally enter the U.S.A. became citizens.

It will take a lot of work, but it should be made a little clearer, and we should also take that to show that teachers are not doing a very good teaching reading. If they were doing a good job, then the present constitution would be adequate, and the Supreme Court would not have decided that presidents retain any shred of immunity from prosecution after leaving office.