What was the founders’ vision for the constitutional amendment process?
About this video
A historian explains that the founders wanted a 'Goldilocks' Constitution: hard to amend for stability, but possible to fix, like mending a machine. The amendment provision helped win ratification, but the founders did not foresee political parties or the polarization since the late 1960s, which has made amending effectively impossible.
You'll be able to
- explain why the founders wanted the Constitution to be hard but not impossible to amend.
- explain why Article V helped get the Constitution ratified.
- explain how political parties and polarization have made amending harder.
Key words
- amend
- To change or improve; it shares a root with 'mend', meaning to repair.
- anti-federalists
- People who opposed the Constitution as first written, partly fearing it gave the national government too much power.
- faction
- The founders' word for a group pursuing its own interests; they saw factions as a disease.
- polarization
- When political sides move far apart and find it very hard to agree.
- supermajority
- A required vote larger than a simple majority, such as two-thirds or three-quarters.
Transcript
I think the founders were looking for the Goldilocks spot. They wanted constitution to be difficult to amend. They wanted a stable fundamental law, but they didn't want it to be impossible to amend because they really believed in this idea of improvement. Amending has the same root as the word mending like you get a tear in your raincoat, and you're going to put duct tape over, you're going to mend it. You break your carburetor, or you're going to fix it. You get a hole in your tire, you're going patch it, like, mending. They believed in repair. They thought of the Constitution as a machine. Machines break down all the time. They wanted it to be possible to fix it. Article V, provision of the Constitution, which is the provision
for Amendment was the most important part of the Constitution, because without it the Constitution never would have been ratified. It was the one thing that anti-federalists were happy about, at least we can fix it. You know what? We're going to do? The first thing we're going to do we're going to defend the bill of rights. They felt like they fixed it enough to accept it. The fixibility, the improvability, the repair ability, the mendability of the Constitution was in some ways the genius of the document, you're going to write something down. You really want to be able to make some adjustments over time. They expected it to be hard, but they expected it to be totally doable. In fact, they did it 12 times before 1804, whatever. The first 12 amendments
happened pretty fast. What they didn't anticipate was the emergence of the party system. There were no political parties at the time. They didn't call them parties. They call them factions. They conceived of them as terrible, like a disease on the body politic. Political parties emerged by the end of the 1790s really early, and they certainly could not have perceived of polarization, the kind of polarization in the United States that really starts in late 1960s, early 1970s. To amend the Constitution, you need a double super majority. It's not like just like a law that we'd have to get a majority of people to vote for, either by way of ratification or a congressional vote. You need two thirds of majority in both houses. Then when the amendment, if it passes, Congress goes to
the states. Three quarters of the states need to ratify it. It's a high bar. It's not impossible, but it is impossible when Congress can't pass a budget. When Congress can't agree on basic matters of good government work. With rising polarization starting the late 1960s, Article V amendments became effectively impossible, but it is now really the only way to change the Constitution.
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