"Lepore has a new book coming out, called We the People, and it's her effort to pull the constitutional conversation out of the dead, frozen earth of the Founders, and to reignite a national conversation about how Americans wish to be governed. On this week's podcast, Lepore joined Dahlia Lithwick to think about a Constitution frozen in amber, as opposed to a constitution capable of repair."
"The book is deliberately rooted in this paradox of permanence and impermanence. You write about the Constitution as "brittle as bone, hard as stone." This animating question of: How do you have an immutable roadmap for democratic self-governance that also contains the seeds of its own demise? One of the themes that you pull out is that the amendment process, like mending, like hemming, was seen as a part of a natural, long progression of repair, refinement, alteration."
The Constitution is treated as an immutable framework, described as brittle and frozen, yet it was originally designed to be amendable and repairable. Amendment once functioned as a routine civic practice akin to mending, hemming, and refinement, enabling democratic adaptation. Recent political maneuvers—threats to deploy the National Guard, extrajudicial attacks on foreign vessels, and efforts to curtail mail-in voting—have intensified fears that democratic norms are eroding. Reclaiming a philosophy of amendment and normalizing constitutional repair can reinvigorate national deliberation, restore democratic adaptability, and prevent constitutional stagnation and potential collapse.
Read at Slate Magazine
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