Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proposed a series of constitutional amendments on Friday that would so fundamentally alter our founding document that it would be akin to throwing out the system of government established by the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and replacing it with something entirely different. The amendments are a hodgepodge of efforts to restore constitutional interpretations that briefly gained traction beginning in the Gilded Age, proposals to implement longtime Republican fantasies, and ideas drawn from the fringes of talk radio and the legal academy. Though Abbott’s new constitution would maintain the federal government’s current division between executive, legislative and judicial branches, the powers of all three branches would be diminished so significantly that the new system of government would be barely recognizable to students of our current system.