We the People: America Forgot How to Change Its Constitution

We the People begins with an idea that challenges the way many Americans are taught to think about the Constitution: Jill Lepore argues that amendment was not an accidental escape hatch in the document but a central part of its design — a mechanism through which later generations could repair rules inherited from the past.

Across American history, thousands of constitutional amendments have been proposed and twenty-seven have been ratified. Lepore follows both the amendments that succeeded and the far larger archive of those that failed, using them as a record of what different generations believed the Constitution could not adequately resolve. Her history moves through questions involving representation, voting rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the Electoral College and the changing role of courts in constitutional interpretation.

This episode explores Lepore’s argument that constitutional change gradually migrated away from Article V and toward judicial interpretation, legislation and battles over the composition of the courts. We also examine the difficulty inside her prescription. Article V requires supermajorities for both proposal and ratification, and critics of easier amendment argue that those barriers provide stability and protect against transient political majorities. Lepore’s history therefore leaves a harder question than simply whether Americans should amend the Constitution more often: whether a political system that has largely stopped using its formal mechanism for constitutional change can recover that practice without first changing the mechanism itself.

If a constitution is meant to govern generations that did not write it, how should those generations distinguish principles worth preserving from rules they should still be able to change?

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We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution by Jill Lepore · 2025

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Narration in this episode is AI-assisted. The writing and the analysis are human.

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