Article

The Consolidated Constitution

We the people, in plain English.

Published August 26, 2026

The United States is governed by three documents that were written across two centuries, in three different registers of English, by people who never sat in the same room. Reading them together is hard. Later amendments silently overrule earlier text without ever quoting it; a clause about counting people for representation sits in Article One while the amendment that rewrote it sits three pages away and eighty years later.
This is one attempt to put them back together. Every operative sentence in the founding law appears here exactly once, in modern American English, in the place where it actually does its work. The Sixteenth Amendment sits inside the taxing power. The Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-third and Twenty-fifth sit inside the presidency. The Bill of Rights is kept whole and named, because it is read and cited as a unit. Everything else has been folded into the body.
This is not the law. It is a reading of the law. Courts apply the original words, not these. Where the original is ambiguous, a plain-English version has to pick a meaning — and picking is an argument. Every place this text picks, it says so in a footnote, gives the authority for the choice, and gives you the strongest case against it. The original wording sits underneath every section, one click away, so you can check the work.