The Constitution

The American Constitution is the most admired founding document in the world. It is also missing something essential.

In DeShaney v. Winnebago County (1989), the Supreme Court confirmed what the text had always implied: the Constitution imposes no affirmative obligation on government to protect citizens from harm it did not directly cause. The Preamble announces an obligation to posterity - to provide food, housing, education, healthcare, and safety for the child who comes after us. The provisions never delivered it. That gap, between what the founding document promised and what it actually requires, is the subject of this book.

The Constitution: Floor Missing applies a single diagnostic tool to the American constitutional architecture: the child test. What does any political or constitutional arrangement produce for the child who has no buffer between themselves and what the document actually delivers - not what it promises, but what it produces? The child with no resources to compensate for structural failure is the most accurate measure of what any system truly is. When we are failing the child test, the failure belongs to the architecture.

Drawing on forty years of clinical practice with the most vulnerable children in America, on the constitutional history of Patrick Henry and the Anti-Federalists who warned this moment would come, on Nietzsche's diagnosis of the great man of the masses, and on Nobel laureate economist James Heckman's finding that early childhood investment produces a thirteen percent annual return - higher than equity market returns - this book makes the case that the absent floor is not an accident. It is a design. And the design can be changed.

With twenty-eight states having filed Article V convention applications - six away from a constitutional convention with no procedural guardrails - the stakes of the absent floor have never been higher. The Preamble's promise of posterity is being captured by figures who would rather hold it over the people than build what it requires. The alternative is simpler than the politics suggests: build the floor. The walls will stay. Once the child is protected, the roof - social security and eldercare for those at the other end of life - becomes the next task.

The Constitution: Floor Missing is the sixth book in the Abundance Series, which traces the relationship between individual psychological development and the structural conditions that make human flourishing possible or impossible. It follows Wisdom in Psychiatry (2025) and precedes The Abundance Life: A Guide from Birth to Posterity (2026).