Why America's veneration of the Constitution may ultimately break it

"As historian and journalist Jill Lepore explains in her new book, We the People: A History of the US Constitution, neither Democrats nor Republicans today consider Article V an effective way of pursuing their policy goals. Since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the sweeping social, political, and economic changes brought about by the New Deal, the government has been reshaped through executive action and Supreme Court decisions."

"Jefferson couldn't disagree more with the sentiment. Convinced that American democracy would survive only if the government could be repaired and updated, he and the other Founding Fathers made sure the Constitution came with a built-in provision for amending its own contents. Unfortunately, the conditions for pushing through such an amendment - a two-thirds majority from both houses of Congress and a three-fourths majority from state legislatures, as outlined in Article V - have proven exceptionally demanding."

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched," Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter - when the United States turned 40 years old, and the War of Independence was slowly starting to fade from living memory into history. "They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment."

Thomas Jefferson warned that treating constitutions as sacred and unchangeable grants excessive authority to past actors and prevents necessary reform. The Constitution includes Article V to allow amendments, but its requirements—a two-thirds congressional majority and three-fourths of state legislatures—have proven exceptionally demanding. Since the New Deal, major policy change has come through executive action and Supreme Court decisions rather than through amendment. These less exacting paths permit officials to act independently of and often against public interests, eroding democratic accountability. The disappearance of amendments contributes to a perilous state of American democracy and undermines constitutional egalitarian ideals.

Read at Big Think