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On Sept. 17, 1787, a group of men in Philadelphia
signed a document that set the course for American politics
and still impacts daily life in the U.S.
more than 230 years later.
The U.S. Constitution.
The first of its kind, and the longest-lasting constitution in the world.
Even today, your health, your safety, even your perception of time —
they're all impacted by this centuries-old document.
It's perhaps the main reason the U.S.
remains stuck on so many important issues.
And while the longevity and near-holy reputation of the U.S. Constitution
leads many to believe it either can't be changed
or shouldn't be changed, it can be.
So buckle your shoes and powder your wigs as we examine
how the Constitution blocks the U.S.
from becoming a thriving, multiracial democracy,
and explore what it will take to change it.
The U.S. constitutional system establishes a fundamentally undemocratic order.
Do you ever look around and wonder how life in the U.S. got so...
desperate?
There's an 18th-century Constitution
that is really mal-equipped to solve 21st-century problems.
What makes the Constitution profoundly flawed is that it doesn't
reflect the current needs and values of this country and its people.
That's great, you say,
but if the Constitution is so broken, show me a concrete example.
These are three of the most fundamental anti-democratic pieces
of the Constitution.
The Electoral College makes it so the president can be elected
without winning the popular vote.
In fact, two of the last four presidents received fewer votes than their opponents.
And the Senate —
well, the Senate's whole existence is based on circumventing democracy.
It gives equal representation to each state, regardless of population.
Back in Philly, this idea passed by only a one-vote margin.
So you could say the Senate was controversial even back then.
And maybe not well thought out.
See, the men in that room back in Philly could never have dreamed
of the vast population differences that states would have in the 21st century.
Today, two senators from states like Wyoming or South Dakota
have the same power as the two senators from California.
And a senator chosen by a few hundred thousand voters
can block the agenda of a president chosen by tens of millions.
See where we're going with this?
Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president,
confirmed by the Senate and then serve for life.
Meaning, the U.S.
can have a president who didn't win a democratic majority
nominating the most powerful judges in the country,
who are then confirmed by senators
whose power is constitutionally designed to undermine majority power.
And it's these same judges who ultimately interpret the Constitution.
You can do a lot of violence with the text of the Constitution,
given its history,
given its modern evolution
and given the limited rights
that people now enjoy under the Constitution
because of its narrow interpretation by the Supreme Court.
So to recap: The men in that room back in Philly laid a path
for a minority political party to stack the most powerful court
in the country and wield generation-changing power.
And they can do all of this without having to win a national popular vote
or even respond to the actual demands of American voters.
All of this facilitates minority rule.
As bad as this sounds, the Constitution is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Because, at its core, the Constitution is all about power —
dictating who gets to wield it, and how.
See, those men in Philly were wealthy, white
and deeply suspicious of the power everyday people might wield in elections.
After all, workers and laborers vastly outnumbered them.
So, they wrote the Constitution in a way that consolidated power for men
like them, and away from true popular democratic rule.
Here's a great example:
He's rich and white, and lost the popular vote by millions.
Yet he was able to stack the court with conservative justices,
thanks to a Republican-controlled Senate that represented a minority of voters.
The minoritarian dimensions of the constitutional system incentivizes
one of the two major parties — the Republican Party —
to see its strength as tied to these counter-majoritarian instruments,
and to then view the actual emergence of a multiracial democracy in the U.S.
as an almost existential threat.
Which is why Republicans continue blocking
legislation aimed at increasing access to the ballot,
and why the U.S. faces one democratic crisis after another.
For example, if abortion access were put to a popular vote in the U.S.,
it would win by a landslide.
Same goes for background checks on guns, voting rights,
environmental protections,
yeeting our current health care system into the sun
and a host of other modern issues.
Yet these things remain stalled and Americans' lives remain desperate.
And it all goes back to what?
A Constitution rooted in slavery, rooted in exclusion,
excluding women, excluding anyone who did not own property,
excluding anyone who is not a man.
This is real.
Rarely, if ever, have women or people of color
had any meaningful say in how the Constitution is written or fixed.
It's a document that, at its core, is written by white men who wanted
to build themselves a country on land violently taken from Native people.
The U.S. Constitution is not just pro-slavery,
it also was built through a project of settler colonialism.
So if Americans wanted to redraft their Constitution
to make it more representative of today's values and demographics,
what would they have to do?
As good citizens we must be quick to use the tools our Constitution gives us
and repair any cracks that may appear.
Thomas Jefferson, seen here on the easily forgotten
$2 bill, is one of the most famous Founding Fathers.
He believed
the Constitution would last less than two decades,
because each generation should interpret the Constitution for itself.
He actually wrote,
"No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law."
Today, that same Constitution theoretically can be changed,
it's just very difficult.
Article 5, which provides for amending the Constitution, shows
that the men who wrote it expected it to change.
The Constitution absolutely can be formally changed.
There are about 200 constitutions around the world.
The U.S. is the oldest.
It's probably the most difficult to amend.
This difficulty is a big reason why life in the U.S.
can feel like running on a hamster wheel, facing the same battles around guns,
and abortion, and countless other issues and not getting anywhere.
Meanwhile, other countries are making real progress.
You don't look to the U.S.
as a model of what to put in your Constitution.
You look to other countries that protect newer forms of rights,
especially social and economic rights,
like the right to health care,
that's in constitutions around the world today.
The right to a job,
that's in constitutions around the world today.
The right to a clean environment, that's in constitutions around the world today.
None of those three appears in the text of the U.S. Constitution.
Think of the U.S. Constitution debuting in 1787 like a new car rolling out of the dealership.
At the time, no one had ever seen anything like it.
It was shiny and full of promise.
But it was kind of a lemon.
Almost immediately, it needed massive repairs to keep it running.
Over the years, it's needed maintenance, like an amendment here and there
to keep the country going, and some major repairs during Reconstruction.
But overall, not many repairs have been possible.
There have been over 12,000 proposals to amend the U.S. Constitution in Congress.
And of those, only
27 have made it through the labyrinth of constitutional amendment.
And remember, 10 of those amendments were immediate.
So, in the 230 years or so since it was written,
the Constitution has only been amended 17 times.
Congress approved the 19th Amendment,
which provided for the voting rights of women.
The last time the Constitution was amended was more than 30 years ago, in 1992.
And that was kind of a quirk.
Before that, it had last been amended when the 26th Amendment expanded
voting rights in the 1970s to all Americans over 18.
Which means it's been more than 50 years
since a meaningful addition has been made to the Constitution.
You could say the U.S.
is part of the check-engine-light club.
Based solely on numbers — not to mention Thomas Jefferson —
you could argue the Constitution is way past due for some repairs.
The average constitution in the world is 19 years old.
They're replaced every 20 years or so.
Not this one.
Some would say, scrap it and just get a new car,
because fixing this car is extremely difficult.
Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution
tells us there are two ways to amend the Constitution.
First, you can call a constitutional convention,
do the very same thing that led to the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1787.
That's never been tried before.
The other way to amend the Constitution requires
two-thirds of the Congress to approve an amendment,
and then 38 out of 50 states have to approve that amendment.
That's a high bar.
That's a very, very high bar.
So, considering the U.S. Constitution can change,
but is mad difficult to change,
what should Americans do?
Well, listening to American news would have you thinking
that Americans are hyperpartisan.
But, if you look at the numbers, that simply isn't the case.
Americans generally agree on big issues.
So, now that we understand that the Constitution
intentionally creates a power imbalance, what would it take for Americans to make
meaningful changes to their Constitution?
- The recipe to amend the U.S. Constitution
requires more than just looking at the text of Article 5.
You need a social movement that builds up from below,
or you need a charismatic leader that leads from above.
The main changes that need to be pursued now are really changes
that would enhance the power that the most marginalized
have in this society.
In order for the Constitution to change today,
the country needs a mass movement on behalf of insurgent democracy.
The world doesn't look to the U.S. Constitution as a model anymore.
It's old. It's outdated. It's ancient.
It actually holds back the possibilities for humanity
to have a Constitution that looks like
the U.S. Constitution's limited protections for rights and freedoms.