Mitt Romney, like more...

...and more conservatives today, seems to believe that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence were divinely inspired. (Never mind that crackpot woman in the video above; listen to what the former governor of Massachusetts says.) 

Sanford Levinson, a professor of government at the University of Texas, writes in the Times today, "Our Imbecilic Constitution," that the document was not only drafted by men, but is seriously flawed as well: 

Ignore, for discussion’s sake, the clauses that helped to entrench chattel slavery until it was eliminated by a brutal Civil War. Begin with the Senate and its assignment of equal voting power to California and Wyoming; Vermont and Texas; New York and North Dakota. Consider that, although a majority of Americans since World War II have registered opposition to the Electoral College, we will participate this year in yet another election that “battleground states” will dominate while the three largest states will be largely ignored. 

Our vaunted system of “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” — a legacy of the founders’ mistrust of “factions” — means that we rarely have anything that can truly be described as a “government.” Save for those rare instances when one party has hefty control over four branches — the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court — gridlock threatens. Elections are increasingly meaningless, at least in terms of producing results commensurate with the challenges facing the country.