“If we were to constantly defer to the history and tradition of this country, we as a court could only ever re-stantiate racial divisions. We could never free the people from them.”
Jill Lepore
0:49Harvard historian Jill Lepore reframes the U.S. Constitution as a document *designed* to change — and argues that America's failure to formally amend it since 1971 is a democratic crisis, not a sign of stability. The amendment process was the framers' deliberate alternative to violent revolution, but the double supermajority threshold they invented has been rendered functionally impossible by partisan polarization. Lepore's database of 12,000 proposed-but-failed amendments reveals a shadow history of what Americans have actually wanted from their government — a record that Supreme Court decisions and constitutional originalism have effectively buried. For any professional trying to understand why U.S. governance feels so gridlocked, this episode reframes the problem: it's not just politics, it's a broken constitutional mechanism no one can fix.
Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joe introduce Article 5 of the Constitution, which covers amendments, and their guest, historian Jill Lepore. They highlight her new book on the Constitution through amendments.
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