The United States’ Unamendable Constitution
It&#x27;s an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I&#x27;d recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you&#x27;re not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a <i>good</i> article though. In particular, I don&#x27;t think it coheres. It&#x27;s about how the modern Constitution has become &quot;un-amendable&quot;, but it spends a big chunk of the middle of the piece demonstrating the Constitution was never really all that amendable: successful amendments are extraordinarily rare, especially when they&#x27;re about big-ticket issues. Our biggest structural changes occurred after an enormous civil war.<p>There&#x27;s a sort of obvious framing to the piece that the Constitution should be more fluid and easy to amend. I think 2022 is a very weird time to prioritize that. I&#x27;m not a doomer about US politics, but they&#x27;re not in a very good state right now. Lepore talks about national abortion, immigration, and firearms policy and how they&#x27;d be impacted by a more readily-amended Constitution, but I think she should take a wider view and look at things like how speech and free association would be impacted.<p>I&#x27;m a liberal, in a cohort of people this article portrays as atypically open to changing the Constitution, and I think the rigidity of the Constitution is probably it&#x27;s greatest strength.