Jill Lepore: 'Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate independence, but it might be more significant, more pregnant with meaning, to celebrate amendment — the writing, ratifying and especially the amending of constitutions.'
In 1982, President Ronald Reagan endorsed a balanced-budget amendment. In the 1990s, Republicans proposed anti-flag-burning amendments, fetal-personhood amendments and defense-of-marriage amendments. Lately, amendments have been coming from the left.
While it’s true that Americans can no longer, for all practical purposes, revise the Constitution, they can still change it, as long as they can convince five Supreme Court justices to read it differently. But how well has that worked out? That’s what happened, beginning in the early 1970s, with abortion and guns, the north and south poles of America’s life-or-death politics, in which either abortion is freedom and guns are murder or guns are freedom and abortion is murder.
“We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth,” Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense,” published in January 1776. The states and the new federal government began writing constitutions that spring.
Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not.
Last year, in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court struck down a 110-year-old firearms law by arguing that the government has an obligation to justify any such regulation “by demonstrating that it is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.
If only the Supreme Court can change the Constitution, it needs a fuller archive. This Fourth of July, the, a research collaborative I’ve directed for the last three years, is publishing a vast new trove of past proposals, a free and fully searchable archive of every notable documented attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution.
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