So of course, the other day I was driving — because that’s my job now. My role as a parent is basically Uber driver. Unpaid, no tips, one-star passengers. Regardless, while I’m doing my shift I like to listen to NPR. I’ve mentioned this before. I’m too lazy to find podcasts, but I enjoy learning things so NPR it is.
I don’t know how people can have anything against NPR. This goes to what I’d call naïve realism — people have these biases against NPR and think its coverage is skewed, when to me it’s based on fact. They’re covering things because the people who work there have life experiences, they discover things, they’re curious. My perception is that they’re open-minded and they want to learn. They don’t want to be the guy going “yes, I am right.” They realize they don’t know everything. And look, everybody has their thing — the way you perceive the world is shaped by your experience, mine included. Anyway, I digress. That’s not the point here.
The guest who ruined my commute (in a good way)
What ended up happening was they had a guest on. And I’ll say up front: I’m definitely far from a constitutional scholar. I’ve never actually sat down and read the Constitution cover to cover. I’m familiar with it — and lately, in our current landscape, the Constitution and what’s actually constitutional comes up quite a bit. Unfortunately, and maybe fortunately, because it makes people look at it.
The guest was Heidi Schreck, who created a one-woman play. When she was a teenager, still in high school, she traveled around giving speeches defending the Constitution to win prize money for college. Out of that experience she built this play, What the Constitution Means to Me. It was fascinating to hear her talk about it, and about the way our Constitution differs from those of other countries — younger countries that wrote their constitutions more recently.
Negative rights vs. positive rights
Here’s the part that was new to me, and the part I keep chewing on. Our Constitution is based on negative rights — things the government cannot take away from you. Whereas other modern constitutions, mostly the ones written after the Second World War, are geared toward positive rights — things the government must provide to you, on top of what it can’t take away.
To me that was eye-opening. Our older document was written in a certain time — the England-and-the-crown time, the monarchy infringing on the rights of the people. That was in the founders’ minds when they wrote it. So the whole frame is “no, the government can’t do this to you.” Meanwhile the newer ones go further and guarantee positive things — healthcare, and other rights guaranteed to citizens. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, sort of taken to the next step.
And it gets a little confusing about what counts as negative and what counts as positive. Freedom of religion, for example, is considered a negative right — it just means the government can’t make you follow a religion. They can’t make you believe anything, can’t establish a national religion. That’s a restraint on the government, so it’s negative. A positive right would be the right to food, or water, or healthcare — and we don’t really have those in this country. We have “they can’t take them away,” but they’re not guaranteed. So maybe the best of both worlds is a document that does both. From my limited research, South Africa seems to have a pretty robust positive-rights constitution.
The part where my brain jumped tracks
This whole thing connected to something else I’ve heard about over the years: the movement for a constitutional convention. The idea is to get enough states to sign on so they can convene a convention and rewrite or amend things. I don’t fully understand all of it, but as I understand it there are a couple of goals: limit the power of the federal government, and pass a balanced-budget amendment — meaning the government would be required to work off a balanced budget, like a household.
On the surface these ideas sound good. Limit the government’s power — who doesn’t want that, right? Nobody really wants the government interfering in their lives. The danger, though, is that if you take power away from the federal government, you hand it to the states. And the states have not always done the best thing by the people or for the people. Look at the South, look at the Civil War, look at a lot of things. The states don’t always do the right thing — they get controlled by the elite, who end up controlling everything.
So here’s my worry. You’d think, great, a convention — maybe we finally get some positive rights out of it. But if you undermine the power of the federal government at the same time, then there’s no way to enforce those positive rights. And worse, you weaken the defense of the negative rights too. Things that can’t be forced on you suddenly could be — a state could establish an official religion, and it would be recognized. To me that’s a problem. And part of what bothers me is that it doesn’t bother some people — they don’t mind a religion being forced on others as long as it’s their religion. That’s a problem all by itself.
Why water isn’t a luxury
I do think everybody should have a right to water. There are certain things people should just have a right to. You shouldn’t have to go pay for water to stay alive. I think water was actually one of the examples in the segment — there are countries where water is a right, there are no water utilities, you don’t get a water bill. Water is water. You need it to live. Why are you paying for it? It’s a little like healthcare.
But we have a distorted view of all this, and the distortion is easy to manufacture. You control the message, you say something over and over, and eventually a certain number of people believe it. This administration is a prime example — they’ll just say things, and it doesn’t have to be true. And no, I’m not going to do the “both sides” thing here. Yes, politicians lie. But this is a whole new game. It’s not even the same field anymore, so the “both sides do it” line is a false equivalence at this point.
The balanced budget trap
Then there’s the balanced-budget amendment, and again — sounds good. The government should have restraints, right? You only make so much money, you shouldn’t spend more, households have to live that way. But look at what’s underneath it. Given everything else the government funds, a hard balanced-budget rule would mean something has to get cut. In theory it could be defense spending. In practice, that’s not likely. Which means the things that actually get cut are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — the social safety nets we all pay into. Structurally, they’d run out of money and eventually go away, and people would be screwed. On the surface it sounds like exactly what we need. But not at that cost.
And I know the response — “opt out, then. You don’t like Social Security, pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” But that safety net, and all the things we pay into, are there to make sure society doesn’t collapse into people just dying, or robbing each other because they’ve got nothing left. You try to build a society that doesn’t have people so desperate that desperation is all they’ve got. Forget even the safety angle — it’s just the right thing to do, to make sure everybody can survive.
So, an odd little link
It was an odd link to make — a one-woman play about the Constitution leading me all the way to convention politics and Social Security — but that’s where Heidi Schreck sent my brain. Part of me thought, okay, maybe a convention is how we finally get positive rights written down. But given the dysfunction of the country, who knows. Maybe this period of disruption ends up pushing us that direction — people finally deciding we need to put these things in writing specifically because there’s a real danger they’re not guaranteed. Because right now they’re not, and to my mind they probably should be.
The government was established to do two things: make sure your rights aren’t infringed upon, and — ideally — make sure you actually have the things you need. It shouldn’t be one-directional. It should be bidirectional. Positive and negative.
And “negative,” honestly, is an odd word for it. Maybe the constitutional scholars set that framing up and could’ve picked better terminology, but that’s where we are. Anyway — it was fascinating. I’d suggest checking it out if this stuff interests you.
Heidi Schreck, What the Constitution Means to Me · @heidischreck
Claude Fact Check
Heidi Schreck and the play — holds up. What the Constitution Means to Me is a real one-woman play written by and originally starring Heidi Schreck. It was a 2019 Tony nominee (Best Play, plus Best Leading Actress) and a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama. Your retelling is accurate: as a fifteen-year-old she earned college money by traveling the country and winning constitutional speech competitions (the American Legion Oratorical Contest). These are often loosely called “debate” competitions, so your wording is fine.
Negative rights vs. positive rights — holds up. This is a well-recognized distinction in constitutional law. The U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights are generally framed as negative rights — restraints on government (“freedom from”). Many constitutions written after World War II include positive rights — entitlements the state must provide (“freedom to”), such as housing, healthcare, or education. Your framing of the historical reason (a reaction to monarchical overreach) is the standard explanation.
Freedom of religion as a negative right — holds up. The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses are classic negative-rights provisions: they restrain the government from establishing a religion or interfering with belief, rather than guaranteeing anything affirmative.
South Africa’s constitution — holds up. South Africa’s 1996 constitution is one of the most-cited examples of a positive-rights document. Section 27 guarantees everyone the right of access to healthcare, sufficient food and water, and social security, and Section 26 does the same for housing — with the state required to progressively realize them within its available resources, and courts able to enforce that obligation.
Water as a right elsewhere — mostly holds up, with nuance. South Africa’s constitution does guarantee access to “sufficient” water, and its policy provides a free basic water allotment per household. The broader claim that some countries have “no water utilities and no water bills” is an overstatement — even places that treat water as a human right still run utilities and often charge for usage above a free basic amount. The core point (that some countries treat basic water as a guaranteed right rather than a pure commodity) is correct.
The constitutional convention / balanced-budget push — mostly right, numbers need a fix. There is a real, active movement to trigger an Article V “convention of states,” and a balanced-budget amendment plus limiting federal power are among its stated goals. Two corrections on the numbers: calling a convention requires 34 states (two-thirds), not “convening” after ~20. As of 2025–26, roughly 27–28 states have active balanced-budget applications on file. Some proponents argue the historical count already hit 34 once rescinded applications are counted back in, but that’s disputed — over a dozen states rescinded their earlier applications, so whether the threshold has actually been met is a live legal fight, not a settled fact. Ratifying any amendment that comes out of a convention requires 38 states (three-quarters) — you had that number exactly right.
“A runaway convention could open everything up” — reasonable, and widely shared. Your worry that a convention couldn’t necessarily be limited to one topic is a real and mainstream concern. It’s a genuine open question, not a settled outcome — nobody knows for sure because the U.S. has never held an Article V convention.
The rest — your opinion, reasonably argued. The claims that a balanced-budget amendment would force cuts to Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid, that weakening federal power would undermine both positive and negative rights, and the read on the current administration and “both sides” are your analysis and values, not checkable facts. They’re internally consistent and defensible; just flagging them as argument rather than verified claim.
Even that's Odd 
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