Seven writers and scholars propose their updates to the 233-year-old text.
 | By Max Strasser |
India's Constitution has been amended more than 100 times in its 71-year life span. France's Constitution has been updated about once every two years since it was adopted in 1958. The United States Constitution, on the other hand, has only seen 27 amendments since it was ratified in 1788 — and 10 of those came three years later in the Bill of Rights. |
Americans love their Constitution. But is this stability proof that our Constitution is timeless — or just unresponsive? |
That's the subject of an essay by my colleague Jesse Wegman, a member of the Times editorial board. Marking 50 years since the last meaningful amendment gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, Jesse writes: "This half-century drought is all the more distressing in a time of intense social and political turmoil, with demands from both the left and the right for large-scale reforms of the American system of government." |
The problem is that the U.S. Constitution is difficult to amend. Doing so requires, as one scholar put it to Jesse, "rolling supermajorities across the country." That's how the founders designed it. Sort of. What they didn't seem to anticipate was a country as polarized along partisan lines as America is today. |
It's hard to imagine big changes to the Constitution these days, just as it's hard to imagine big changes to America more generally. But spurring a bit of imagination is what we want to do this summer in Times Opinion's series Snap Out of It, America! |
As part of that project, we asked seven scholars to weigh in with ideas for a 28th Amendment. One suggests making international law a basis for American law; another wants to extend the rights of personhood to the unborn; another proposes guaranteeing a right to labor organizing. |
You may not like all of these ideas. You may not like any of them. But we hope that by offering suggestions we can open up — as Jesse also aims to do in his piece — a conversation about what may be possible. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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