Historian Jill LePore says the founders intended the Constitution as a living and amendable (by "we the people") document. But it's become notoriously difficult to change.
For more than two centuries, amendments have allowed our Constitution to grow with the country. The 13th Amendment, for instance put an end to slavery, while the 19th gave women the vote. It was intended to be amended.
But you have to go back more than 50 years to find a meaningful change to the Constitution. Asked how long we can work as a country without updating the Constitution, Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, replied, "The real fear that the founders had was that we would stop listening to each other. They thought self-government was hard, and that crucially requires deliberation and debate."
Before anyone could even consider a national constitution, of course, there was the Declaration of Independence, ratified in 1776, and the Articles of Confederation, agreed to in 1777, a full decade before the new Constitutional Convention.
Historian Jill Lepore's latest book, "We the People," describes a Constitution ratified by the people it governed, and designed to be changed by the very same. In other words, we aren't stuck with any of it. But at the outset, she said, "The support for the Constitution and its ratification was pretty slender."
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