 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's a pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with John Cowell and Wilfred Quadrington III, about their new book, The People's Constitution. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, September 23rd, at 1 p.m., Joseph Ellis will tell us about his new book, The Cause, The American Revolution, and its discontents. In this work on the American founding, Ellis challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people and a nation. And on Wednesday, September 29th at 1 p.m., Andrew O'Shaughnessy will discuss Thomas Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia, which is the subject of his new book, The Elimitable Freedom of the Human Mind, Thomas Jefferson's idea of a university. Constitution Day, September 17th commemorates the day our U.S. Constitution was signed by members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. But almost immediately after, changes were called for. Some of the states would ratify only with the promise of amendments, which became our Bill of Rights. The ability to accommodate change was built into the Constitution in Article 5, and the bar to amending is set high, since the ratification of the Bill of Rights more than 11,000 amendments have been proposed in only 17 past. On this Constitution Day, we will hear from the authors of the People's Constitution a new book that examines the creation of our Constitution, not just the article signed in 1787, but the entire document, including its 27 amendments. John F. Cowell, a former director of grant-making initiatives at the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, is vice president for programs at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. He writes on issues of constitutional law and democracy reform. Wilfred U. Codrigan III is an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. His teaching and scholarship focuses on constitutional law, election law, race, and anti-discrimination. Now let's hear from John Cowell and Wilfred Codrigan III. Thank you for joining us. Hello, everyone. So I'm not John and Wilfred, but they will be with us in a moment. My name is Elizabeth Weidra. I'm president of the Constitutional Accountability Center. I'm coming to you from London, so I apologize if there are some technical difficulties, and I promise we'll do our best. CAC, the organization that I have the honor to be president of, is a nonprofit law... ...taken action center focused on making real the pillar. I'm so delighted that those of you watching could join us for Constitution Day 2021. This event is part of the Civics Education Initiative of the National Archives, and I'm so delighted to be here. As I mentioned, I'm coming to you from London, where there are surprisingly few Constitution Day events, but I can't imagine why that would be so in all seriousness. I'm sure that this event will be wonderful because we are discussing a fantastic new book. As Mr. Ferriero said, it's called The People's Constitution, 200 years, 27 amendments, and the promise of a more perfect union. So further excellent bios from the archivist himself. So welcome to both of you. Thank you, Elizabeth. It is such... I'm John Cowell. It is such a pleasure to be here, particularly with you, Elizabeth. I've known and admired your work for a long time now, and the work of the Constitutional Accountability Center is so important in bringing to every American the true history and meaning of our Constitution. I'm also really grateful to be here as a guest of the National Archives. It's a tremendous honor, and it's particularly fitting because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are enshrined here at the National Archives for all Americans to enjoy for posterity. In fact, on the very first page of our book, we mentioned the National Archives. We describe how the Archives has keeps the Constitution in a high tech box of titanium glass and metal of titanium and glass, sorry, preserved. And it's sort of a metaphor for the way many people think of the Constitution preserved in an airless box, frozen in time. But we're going to talk about why that's the wrong way to think about a Constitution that has grown and evolved over two centuries. Wilfred, you're muted. Sorry for the technical difficulties. Yeah, I also want to thank you, Elizabeth, for moderating this discussion and the National Archives for hosting this event. Happy Constitution Day, everyone. This is really a trifecta for constitutional merits like us, you know, being here at the National Archives with our first book talk on the Constitution on the Constitution Day. But as John said, we open the book here at the National Archives. And we do so with the question, who wrote the Constitution? And it seems pretty straightforward, a question with a fairly knowable answer. Growing up, we all learned about the framers of the Constitution. We learned about the four and a half dozen men donning powdered wigs. We learned that they came to Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a new National Charter, and among them were many men we still know and talk about today, men like George Washington, James Madison, Ben Franklin. There were also other delegates that have largely been forgotten to history. But overall, it was a impressive roster. It was the who's who of American law and politics. You know, Thomas Jefferson was not there. He was in Paris. He was representing the United States as the ambassador to France. But he referred to this Constitution as an assembly of demigods. That was only the beginning. It was the first of many chapters and a much longer story. And that's what we seek to do in this book. Our book seeks to tell some of these stories, tell the stories of the full range of figures who shaped our Constitution over the many generations to today. Thank you. So I'm so glad that we're talking about your book today on Constitution Day, because, you know, as you kind of alluded to, whether you think about it under, you know, titanium and in sealed gas, you know, special environments or whether you have this image of these bewigged white men in Philadelphia, you know, so many of us think of the Constitution in this, I guess, remote kind of old way. And while obviously that moment in Philadelphia was the spark that set things off and truly laid the foundation for a national charter, our Constitution has followed an arc of progress from the late 1700s to today. And one of the things I love about the amendment process is that you can see this arc of progress literally written across the face of the document in the form of these amendments that made our nation and our Constitution more equal, more inclusive, freer and fairer. And it's a way that we, the people, including the we that was excluded from those moments in Philadelphia, wrote ourselves into the story. And I find that incredibly inspiring. And so I'm so glad we're here talking about your book to expand this conception of what we are observing, what we are marking when we mark Constitution Day. So I'd love to hear from you first. You know, this is your first book talk on this endeavor. And I'd love to hear what inspired you to take this arc of constitutional progress, the amendments, both past and potential, and turn it into this great new book. John, you're muted. More technical difficulty is our first book event. The the inspiration for this book goes back to the election of 2016, when for the second time in 16 years, we elected a president who failed to win the majority of the votes of the people. And there are many Americans who would like to see the electoral college system abolished. It's a controversial issue. But what struck us was is that there really was remarkably little energy on actually changing the Constitution. I mean, yes, it's hard. Yes, you know, it's not going to happen tomorrow, but it just, you know, we began to wonder why is it that people today tend to feel that it's too hard or possibly even too dangerous to amend the Constitution when, in fact, in the past, there have been these transformative changes. And what was it about these earlier generations that, you know, we could learn from and maybe, you know, help us today to think about the possibility of making our own mark on the Constitution in the 21st century. We'll talk more about that, but it really was a. We wrote this book to basically challenge a pervasive sense of defeatism about fixing the Constitution. Other generations were able to do it. We have the power today to make our Constitution more democratic, more inclusive and more suited to the challenges of the 21st century. Yeah. And in addition to that, what we're trying to do with this book was to make sure that it was historically accurate and rigorous and sort of paint a broad picture of what our sort of constitutional history looked like in our constitutional trajectory was. But we also try to make it very accessible. So this is a book we hope that students in high school and students in college will be able to pick up and learn about these fascinating and colorful stories about how we got the progress in our country to bring us to where we are today. We wanted to make it fun, you know, for the readers out there. And we really tried to bring out the voices of how people thought about this, talked about this from old newspapers and debates in Congress. And so you'll see that it really is story driven and not just legal text. I'm a Constitution nurse. You've already sold me on that. This is fun. But I hope others agree with all of us. So before we move on to why amendments are difficult and dangerous, but worth it, I want to stay focused on the original framers for a moment. I think it's important to remember that when they say in the preamble that we're coming together to form a more perfect union, that that refers to both a union that's more perfect than the system of tyranny that they existed under British rule, but also more perfect than the flawed and deeply dysfunctional articles of confederation that they put in place during the revolutionary war period. So in your book, you talk a lot about how when they talked about making this more perfect union, they were all too aware that what they were creating would not be the last word and they intended it to be amended. That's why we have the amendment process in there. And so when you say that they produced an imperfect Constitution that required changes by amendment, what do you mean by that? OK, so the framers came to Philadelphia for the purpose of fixing a broken system of government. As Elizabeth indicated, the Articles of Confederation created a very weak national government. It was framed in the document as a firm League of Friendship. So it sounds more like a military alliance, perhaps, than an actual united country. And in fact, for the first dozen years after independence, the states basically jealously guarded their independence, their sovereignty. They assumed a lot of powers that we normally think of of belonging to the national government from coining money, having their own foreign policy. The powers of the national government in the Articles of Confederation were severely constrained, mostly military and foreign policy. But significantly, the Articles did not give Congress the Contra, the Confederation Congress, the power to tax. And so it was a weak government limping along. And it didn't take long for there to be a sense of a grave crisis enveloping the country. George Washington in a letter expressed his dismay at what he calls a half-starved limping government, tottering it every step. So political leaders, like you did, is a necessity to amend the Articles of Confederation. And what they wanted to do was just if we just give the federal government or the national government more power, we can maybe get past these problems. Unfortunately, to amend the Articles, you needed the approval of every state. And that proved very quickly to be a bar that was impossible to overcome. Time and again, when they proposed amendments to give Congress more power to regulate interstate commerce, more power to raise money, it was the interest of one state would stop the amendment from happening. They never could get unanimous support. So we had this growing sense of crisis that brought people to Meakin, Philadelphia in May 1787. Their charge from the Contra Confederation Congress was to establish a firm national government. But very quickly, once they got behind closed doors, they realized that they were not going to try to fix the dysfunctional articles. They threw them out, ripped them up, and they started over. But it wasn't it wasn't a picnic, but there was four months of haggling and and hate and disagreement. And at the end, they created a constitution that was a product of numerous compromises. But it's a constitution that actually leaves very few people total. Many people saw things they liked and things they didn't like. And there are three major compromises we talk about in the book. So there there were compromises between people who saw the need for a strong national government and those that wanted to to still be a robust role for the states. There were compromises between people, idealists, I would call them, who believed in a system of democracy where our leaders were chosen by the people and others who were more skeptical elitists who worried that giving too much democracy would would create excesses. And they wanted to really kind of limit that. And also to which, you know, almost ruinously, there were compromises between the defenders of slavery and those who at least profess to despise slavery, a compromise that would lead to war in 70 years. So, you know, we say in the book, we acknowledge that the constitution they created was a remarkable achievement for its time. It gave future generations of America a government strong enough to address our nation's problems. It created an ingenious system of three branches of government through a principle of checks and balances where no branch of government becomes too powerful and it left us an enduring system of federalism that still preserved a very strong role for states at the same time that we have this more effective national government. Yeah. And so we have this novel system that the framers developed, this product of the enlightenment that embraces the values of liberty and common defense. But we also have to remember that this was still a document created by men and only men, as you mentioned right up front, Elizabeth, which is to say that this is a document created by people who were infallible. They were men who possessed a certain worldview, a worldview of 18th century values. Nearly half of the framers own slavery as slaves during some point in their lives. Most of them believe that voting should be extremely restricted, made accessible only to property owning men. And none of them could imagine a world in which women were truly equal to men. So they were foul. And therefore, it should be no surprise that the Constitution they came to create was also foul. It had its own share of shortcomings. It had a cribbed vision for democracy. So we have a president and the U.S. Senators. They were only selected by intermediaries. Our federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, were appointed and burned by these two bodies. It was only the House of Representatives, which was the only part of the government that was really chosen by the people. And as you again mentioned right up front, Elizabeth, their view of the people was limited. It did not include my ancestors. It also contained a number of technical areas. It omitted some important things, for example, meaningful protections of individual rights and individual liberties. And of course, as John mentioned, its sanctions, slavery and racial subjugation are nation's original sin. So we have the shortcomings, but the framers never believed that the Constitution was a work of perfection. They believed it was flawed. We know this because Ben Franklin was the elder statesman at the convention. He said as much in a speech at the end of the convention. But even more, we know this because they included a way to fix the Constitution, a way to update it over time by constitutional amendment. And that's Article 5. That's the Constitution's amendment provision. And so it was through Article 5 that we got much of our Constitution. In fact, we got about 40 percent of our Constitution in this way. It's the result of amendment, the 27 amendments, which were adopted after the Constitution was ratified in 1788. And so really that's the aim of people's Constitution. It's to tell these stories, these stories about how Americans took this imperfect, important, but imperfect Constitution. And despite all these obstacles, they employed the amendment process and they made our Constitution more democratic and more inclusive and more suited for us in the times. And so it's just important to know a few things quickly. Some of the changes were super profound, like the 13th Amendment. We mentioned outlawed slavery, the 19th Amendment gave them the right to vote. Some were just these minor technical fixes. The 20th Amendment, it just adjusted the government calendar. Some aimed high, like the 14th Amendment, which inserted the word equal in our Constitution for the first time and some were sort of not as bold, right? The 23rd Amendment only gave DC a role in the Electoral College, but it leaves it without voting representation in Congress, right? So we think about these different ways that we need to amend the Constitution. We have amended the Constitution, but taking together much of what we consider to be the heart of our Constitution, these guarantees for equal protection and due process, the protections for religious liberty and free speech. Those are things that came through the constitutional amendments. These are what John and I refer to as the periodic upgrades of the beta version of our 18th century national chart. Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's so important to recognize this struggle of the founding era, you know, between some of the founding principles, you know, like they're laid out the Declaration of Independence and then what, you know, you term these compromises, which you could call a compromise, you could call it a repudiation of those principles and the Declaration of Independence to have a document that, you know, allows for the enslavement of human beings. How does that square with these principles that were our north star in the Declaration of Independence? And, you know, I think it's through the amendment process that we actually build a Constitution more in line with the Declaration of Independence. You know, it's not till we get to the Forkings Amendment that we actually write into the Constitution those principles of the Declaration. But I, you know, I love that you focus on the amendment process because that is really the way that, you know, the people who weren't included in the founding can find their voice in the Constitution. It gives us that opportunity to seize that power ourselves through the amendment process. And one of the things I thought was really interesting that you talk about in your book is that, you know, obviously, there are these amendments and we can read them in the Constitution. But you talk about how they follow a cyclical pattern and being added to the Constitution. Can you explain what you mean by that? Sure. Yeah, of course. So if you examine history, you do see this recurring pattern. Most of the amendments have been added in these relatively compressed periods, not staccato, but as clusters. And these periods just last for a brief, brief few years. And then almost as predictably, you just see these periods we see and that's to say you have these long periods of mall where Article Five is not being used. And John and I sort of see that this has occurred in four distinct times. So the first wave of amendments started and finished within a decade and a half of the Constitution's adoption. So this is between 1789 and 1804. During this period, we added the first ten amendments what we have come to know as the Bill of Rights, as well as a few others that dealt with some early flaws in the Constitution, including the Electoral College. After that, we have a 61 year debt, no amendments until the end of the Civil War. But in that five year period following the Civil War, so we're now in 1865 to 1870, we added three amendments. And these amendments were nothing short of revolutionary. The Reconstruction Amendments, they were a product of the abolitionist movement and they were part of what has come to be known as the Second Founding. We call it the Second Founding because they enshrined some of the most fundamental values and principles in our Constitution by ending slavery, by guaranteeing equal citizenship and voting rights for the newly freed and really also by imposing new limitations, significant limitations on state governments so they couldn't resort back to things like enslaving people. And then we have this another half year, half century of dormancy. And in that period of quiet, that lapses and we get four more gold amendments. This was now 1909 and we're getting these amendments as a part of reforms associated with the Progressive Era. These amendments, they authorize the federal income tax. They provide for the popular election of senators. They extend the franchise to women, which is the capstone of the suffrage movement. And then you also have in that cluster, the 18th Amendment, which is what outlaws alcohol. It was also part of this wave. It was the centerpiece of the prohibition movement. It was a bit disastrous, as we know, we ended up repealing that one. But these amendments, like the 13th Amendment, they were the culmination of these social movements of strategic activism. And then we have the most recent period, the most recent period of amendment activity came during the Civil Rights Era. So now we're talking about the 1960s into 1971. And we had three amendments that deal with voting. They expand voting rights. So as I said, they include the District of Columbia and the Electoral College. They eliminate the poll tax and then they lower the national voting age to 18. The other amendment in this period was adopted in the wake of President Kennedy's assassination. That address presidential succession, which was something that became very important in the nuclear age. And so we should be noted that during this most recent wave of Constitution change, we also came close to adding two more. The Equal Rights Amendment, which was to the idea was to ensure gender equality and a more complete D.C. Amendment. So this amendment would have given D.C. the rights to be represented fully in the Congress and also in the Constitution Amendment process, like the states do. These were some of the bolder amendments of that period, but they fell short in the state. So they didn't obtain the 38 states that were needed for ratification. But then, as we know, it brings us to today that that period had another drawn spell that followed it. Fifty years, a half century has lapsed since we last proposed an amendment. So maybe it's, you know, when you don't see amendments happening, you kind of forget that they're possible. So, you know, I mean, certainly, you know, I haven't seen an amendment pass in my lifetime and, you know, I think maybe a lot of folks just kind of get into the constitutional inertia. But when you see this burst of activism, it inspires further activism. And it's certainly true that amending our Constitution is exceptionally difficult. You note in your book that of more than 12,000 revisions proposed since 1789, only 27 amendments have actually been enshrined in our Constitution. John, why is that? Well, you're right that it's difficult and, you know, it it's it's strange. You know, we try to look at this in the book. So we know that the framers were concerned about the difficulty of amending the Articles of Confederation. So you and that's one of the major reasons they came to Philadelphia in 1787. So you would think that they would give a lot of thought to having a really strong and effective amendment procedure. But from what we can find in the record, it appears that they actually gave little thought to what an ideal process would look like. It never really occupies a lot of room, at least in the notes of the Constitutional Convention. So they it it kind of developed by committee and by like additional actions. So they came up with a fairly complicated process where there are two ways to propose an amendment and two ways to ratify an amendment. We call it the amending two step because you do have to do these two steps. And notably, each step requires supermajority support. So again, the first step is ratifying the Constitution. And the Constitution gives gives us two ways to do it. One I'm sorry. Let me start over. I said that wrong. The first step is proposing an amendment and the Constitution gives us two ways. So there's one way, which is the only way we have ever used, is that Congress proposes an amendment with a two thirds vote in each house. There is an alternative means of proposing an amendment where two thirds of the states can summon a Article 5 convention. And that would propose an amendment that has never happened in our history. We've had some close calls as we can discuss. And in fact, it's been a very controversial feature of the Constitution. The second step is the ratifying step. And again, there are two ways to do it. It's it's it's left to the states. The states have three fourths of the states to ratify. The Congress can specify that state legislatures ratify an amendment to the Constitution, and that's mostly the way we've done it. Or it can specify that each state call an elected convention that would decide to ratify the convention. We did this only once in 1933 to fast track the repeal of the prohibition amendment that Elizabeth described, or that Wilfred described as a bad a bad call for this country. So, you know, you know, it is clear that the framers never imagined that they could have a perfect Constitution. They said so all the time. They actually were on record saying that they wanted a Constitution that was amendable, both to correct mistakes and to make sure that it would be relevant in changing times. And as Wilfred mentioned, it's noteworthy that many of those people in that first generation, you know, were around when we added twelve amendments to the Constitution in 15 years. So there's no doubt that they imagined we'd have plenty of amendments to the Constitution. But when you look at the history, at the end of the day, the framers were interested in locking in those compromises we talked about, many of which were abhorrent and would have to be undone. So they looked for a middle ground. You know, they didn't want the Constitution to be too amendable. And Madison and James Madison in one of the Federalist papers describes this balance as guarding against what he calls that extreme facility that would make the Constitution too mutable while avoiding that extreme difficulty that might perpetuate its discovered faults. Most scholars say that they got this balance wrong. And Wilfred and I have to agree the amendment process is too difficult. And as we see in these long dry spells, the kind of huge challenge of winning supermajority support twice, getting two thirds of Congress or two thirds of the states getting three fourths of the states, you know, it breeds a sense of defeatism and futility. But we're here to say that difficult is not impossible. And that when you look at the history, you see that people had this feeling of of impossibility right up until the time when suddenly there was a window of opportunity to make it happen. And so, you know, we say there's no reason to think this history is over. And it is an interesting contrast to, you know, other written constitutions around the world where there are many, many, many amendments made, you know, the Justice Ginsburg commented on this, you know, the difference between the U.S. Constitution and other constitutions around the world. And maybe it wasn't such a good thing that we considered ours so difficult to amend. But given that, it's really quite remarkable that we have made the revolutionary amendments to the Constitution that we have, you know, Wilfred, I think you very rightly called up the second founding. These amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, which made radical and revolutionary changes to our Constitution, ending chattel slavery, although in the 13th Amendment, there is the loophole for involuntary servitude for those who are incarcerated. And there is an abolition amendment that has been introduced in Congress. So folks should focus on that while we're thinking about amendments. But, you know, these amendments, like the 14th Amendment, that not just entrench and promise equality and liberty for all people that sets out a birthright citizenship, equal principle of all born in America being equally American at birth. But it also has changed the structure of the federal state relationship in a crucial way that I think really does justify the label of a second founding because it is such a revolutionary rewriting of the Constitution. And, you know, I think a lot of folks would be surprised to learn that, you know, states could infringe away on many of their sacred Bill of Rights liberties until the 14th Amendment bound the states to respect those rights as well. So I wanted to ask, you know, given that they're so hard to put into the Constitution and yet these amendments have been, what in your view are some of the most significant amendments that have made it through? Yeah, so I also want to just add, you know, we could also look to state constitutions, right, as an example of something that's easier to amend. John mentioned that we've had or maybe as you know, as I don't recall, but that there were 12,000 proposals to amend the Constitution. But we've only had 27. Well, in the states, we've had 12,000 amendments to the Constitution. That's right. So it can be done other places. They've made it easier. Yeah. So which has which have been the most significant amendments? You know, most every amendment is significant. The very nature of amending the Constitution, of changing our governing charter, that should not be just a little change. That's, you know, that's to say that we should not be taking up the amendment pen lightly, but I'm going to have to echo a bit, which you said, Elizabeth, if I'm going to talk about the most significant ones, because those are the amendments from the second founding, the 13th and 14th Amendment. And as we talked about, the 13th Amendment proposed and ratified during the end of the Civil War, it abolished slavery. It is difficult to rival that full stop, right? The amendment emancipated four million black people. It affirmed their personal dignity and it acknowledged the fundamental liberty that they are owed as human beings. And it's also important because unlike the Bill of Rights and unlike the 11th Amendment, which sought to limit the power of the federal government, the 13th Amendment restricted the power of the states and it expanded federal power. So it allowed the Congress to pass appropriate legislation to enforce the ban on slavery. So the 13th Amendment is probably the most profound and significant. But the 14th Amendment would have to be the close second. Today, we don't really think about the 13th Amendment much because, well, we don't really have slavery. So we don't tend to think about that. But we always think about the 14th Amendment, which was enacted three years after abolition. The 14th Amendment is a long amendment. In fact, it's the longest amendment. So it is chock full of goodies. It declares that all persons, everyone born in the United States is a citizen and a citizen in the United States and a citizen of the state where they reside. This basically repudiated the Supreme Court's holding in the Dred Scott decision. That decision held that black people could never be citizens. And so the 14th Amendment does that. It also protects some of our most fundamental rights. It guarantees us due process of law and equal protection. And it guarantees this in a way where it applies to both states and the federal government. And so that's why I say we always think about the 14th Amendment today, right? In a way that we don't think about the 13th Amendment. And the Supreme Court has interpreted the 14th Amendment to do amazing things, to do amazing progressive things, to outlaw Jim Crow and racial segregation to protect women's rights. It relied on the 14th Amendment to guarantee marriage equality just six years ago. And like the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment has an enforcement clause that authorizes Congress to make its promises a reality. So Congress has drawn on the power of the 14th Amendment to pass some of the most significant legislation we can think of. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, right? So I would have to say that the 13th and 14th Amendment, not to sound like a broken record, are the most significant amendments we've had in. John, you don't have to pick a favorite child, but are there any amendments that you would like to lift up? Yeah, so I agree with Wilfred that those are the two most profound amendments. I'll just mention two others briefly. So one is the 16th Amendment. It was adopted in 1913 and it authorized the income tax. And it's significant, number one, because it's a case where the American people overturned one of that most hated Supreme Court decisions of all times. It was really the citizens united of its day. It was called the Pollock Decision. And it, in an indefensible way, took away this powered tax. And why was that important? Because if you go back to the early 20th century and you look back at like American history up until then, almost all the taxes paid in America were paid by the lowest income. All of our taxes were regressive. And every time, and when as the wealthy class got wealthier and wealthier, and people wanted them to pay their fair share, the Supreme Court said you can't do that. And that outraged a lot of people. But the authorization of the income tax made possible progressive government and modern government in the 20th and 21st centuries. And so for that reason, I would say it's one of the most significant progressive accomplishments of all time. And then just briefly, I think you can't leave out the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised half of the US population with the, there was still a struggle in terms of black women and women with color voting. But it's a powerful story of activists fighting for so long. Susan B. Anthony talked about 42 years of pauseless campaigning to win a little bit of rights for women. And so we just had the 100th anniversary of that, but I still get goosebumps thinking about how significant that is for our country. Yeah, absolutely. And that caveat that you put in there is important. The amendments are crucial, crucial steps toward protections and guarantees of liberty. But they are just an initial, crucial step, making them actually a reality for all people is the next step. And having these enforcement powers, which were added, that was an innovation put in with the 13th Amendment. And then the fight to get that implementing legislation to make sure that these aren't simply paper promises is something we're still fighting for today. I think that we're talking about the struggle for voting rights, whether it's based on gender, race, income, all of which are implicated in the amendments, but then still the struggle goes on or true democratic inclusivity on those grounds is important. So we've talked about some of the success stories of the amendments, but in the book, you also tell the story of six amendments that fell short. John, tell us about some of these failures. Yeah, we kind of always hesitate to call them failed amendments, but it is what people often call them. And it's the true story. We asked one of the leading experts on constitutional amendments, a professor named John Vile, who's written the encyclopedia of amendments, tons of scholarship. And he was very, very kind about the book. But one of the things that struck me is he said that he loved the fact that we talked about these six amendments and people needed to know this story. So yeah, so there are six amendments that made it through the first hurdle, got two thirds of Congress to support them only to fall short when it came time to try to get three quarters of the states. So some of them are quirky. So like in 1810, and this was at a time of growing concern about foreign influence in our politics and in our affairs. Two years later, we would be at war with Britain. But at a time of like heightened paranoia, accompanied also by tabloid stories of the nephew of Emperor Napoleon of France marrying an American woman and what would that mean and would they install him as the emperor of the United States. Congress passed a titles of nobility amendment. And there already were prohibitions in the constitution against accepting titles and what are called emoluments from foreign countries. This amendment was intended to really up the stakes. It really said your citizenship would be automatically canceled if you accepted this title of nobility or if you accepted emoluments. It never really got anywhere, but it's just a reflection in time of this momentary concern about foreign affairs, I mean, foreign interference in our affairs, which frankly, we've experienced in our lifetime as well with Russia and other countries. One of the stories that I actually didn't know when we started this is the story of the Corwin amendment. It was named after a congressman, Thomas Corwin. It was proposed by Congress in 1861 as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the civil war. The story of it is actually almost comical, how they were basically on the floor of Congress for the last 48 hours of the session, literally in the morning of the last day of the session, as Abraham Lincoln is waking up and getting ready to deliver his inaugural address, they approve the amendment by the, while it sounds like a great thing to try to avoid the war, the Corwin amendment would have preserved slavery or posterity permanently in all the states where it already existed. It was a horrible compromise. People voted to get forward against their own better judgment, but Abraham Lincoln actually said something positive about it at his inaugural address. And so it's just sort of a moment in time where people would be willing to go to. I will say though that Frederick Douglass definitely let Abraham Lincoln hear about that and he and Lincoln happily went in a different direction. Finally, I think one of the really fun stories in the book is the saga of what we call the Madison amendment. And so when James Madison was writing the Bill of Rights, he added a couple of other amendments that didn't actually get ratified. One of them had to do with congressional pay. It was a fairly modest measure that just said that Congress cannot raise its pay. It can't be effective until another election. And it was intended simply to be a check against self-dealing. It didn't get ratified and most people thought of it as a dead letter. But then it's forward to the early 1980s and there was a college student named Gregory Watson who stumbled across this amendment doing some research for a term paper. And so he wrote a term paper saying what this amendment was and hypothesizing that the state still could ratify it two centuries later. This teacher didn't think much of it and gave him a seat but he turned his disappointment into a one-man campaign to ratify this 200-year-old amendment. And so he wrote to state lawmakers, took a while but he started getting into respond within nine years this one-man campaign convinced state legislatures to adopt one final amendment to the constitution 203 years after James Madison wrote it, it's the 27th amendment and it's the last one to be added to our constitution. I suspect Elizabeth might have frozen for a moment. Yeah, so she may be coming back but I know we were gonna turn to kind of the last chapter of the book, Wilfred. And it's really our kind of hypothesis that a new wave of constitutional amendments which would be the fifth wave may be actually building already. You wanna talk about that a little bit? Yeah, sure and I'll say this is our hope, right? John will agree he is not a medium. I packed my tarot cards up so I can't predict the future but what we've done is to examine some of the social and political conditions that existed at the outset of prior amending waves. So we realize that there are some of these similarities that we're seeing today and we call these modern conditions green shoots, so these signs of renewed interest in constitutional amendments. And so among these indicators, one we talked about are universally reviled Supreme Court decisions. In fact, horrendous Supreme Court decisions have been a huge catalyst for constitutional amendments. Earlier I talked about the Dred Scott decision, it was a driver of the Reconstruction Amendments in effort to repudiate slavery and the idea that black people could not be citizens, they were unworthy of citizenship. John mentioned the 16th Amendment, right? That was in response to Pollock and that was a case in which the justices said that federal government lacked the power to impose income taxes. And today, if we ask most people what's the worst Supreme Court decision, many will say citizens united, right? That's the decision which basically equates political speech with money. It is hated by Americans on all parts of the political spectrum. And notably there are several campaigns to amend the constitution to reverse that decision and related decisions. These are efforts to amend the constitution to enable lawmakers to enact reasonable common sense reforms to limit massive spending by corporations and billionaires. Corporations and billionaires were seeking to advance their narrow interests at the expense of the common interests. And so we highlight some of those efforts that are pushing to do just that. Another indicator that's kind of near and dear to our hearts, I wouldn't have to say, is the sort of sub-constitutional experimentation and that's this sort of movement going on in the States. These are constitutional type reforms without actually amending the US constitution itself. Instead they're using US state constitutions and state laws. This happened with abolition. So before the 13th Amendment, slavery was outlawed in several states either through their constitutions or their Supreme courts. Probably the most ingenious example of this sub-constitutional experimentation dealt with the direct election of senators. So before the 17th Amendment, state lawmakers, not US citizens, state lawmakers chose the senators, right? And this became problematic for several reasons, including public corruption. So it gave these seats to very shady politicians accepting all sorts of bribes. It caused gridlock. So this resulted in these Senate seats being like vacant. And so the states used their constitutions to create this workaround and they passed these laws to hold state lawmakers accountable and it made them choose the senator that was the most popular among them and their states. And so this was adopted as a law. And finally, senators were being elected basically de facto by the people. And so when that happened, US senators dropped their opposition to the direct election by their constituents because they obviously owed allegiance to the state legislators. So they didn't wanna step on those toes. Today we see a comparable effort. It's a way to elect the candidate who wins the most popular votes nationally as president. Everyone knows that the electoral college chooses the president. States are now engaging with this sub-constitutional reform to award their share of electoral votes to whomever wins the most popular votes nationally. And that's irrespective of whether the candidate won their votes. And so when enough states sign on to this compact, it's called the National Popular Vote Compact, this agreement, they'll ensure that the winner of the popular vote and the winner of the electoral vote are won in the state. And as I said, this one's important to John and me because it really was the 2016 election that sort of prompted us to write this book because the president became president while losing the popular vote by 3 million. And sort of just one more is to sort of throw out their renewed interest in the Equal Rights Amendment. So there is this pressure to adopt an amendment to constitutionally guaranteed gender equality. And this is nearly a century after it was first proposed and four decades after Congress actually proposed it and it fell short of ratification in states. And so, you know, there's been this great display of women's activism in line with the Me Too movement and the Times-Up movement and the like. So ERA activists, they have really capitalized on this energy and they're trying to get this additional amendment. And actually recently they secured those three states that they fell short by back in the 70s and the 80s. And so there's a big debate over whether the ERA is actually ratified validly. It's a debate that even came here to the National Archives because the National Archivist is the one who certifies amendments as being validly adopted. But right now the debates in the courts and with members of Congress they're gonna continue to fight about that. So we're seeing these parallels, these green shoots on the progressive side and sort of just quickly, we're also seeing some similarities on the conservative side. We're seeing what we saw in the past and there's this interest. John talked about it right up front in summoning this first ever constitutional convention. And basically these states are passing legislation for two thirds of the states. If they pass this legislation, they demand that Congress will call this convention. Frankly, John and I are among the many people who think the effort is wrongheaded and dangerous. But that's what we're seeing. Thank you so much for that. And we don't have that much time left, but I do wanna get to a really excellent audience question. And this audience member asks, what are ways that we could promote a steady flow of amendments rather than having spontaneous clusters that would allow us to not wait until there are tipping points like terrible Supreme Court rulings. So that's the audience member question I would add on to that, whether you think it would be a good thing to do something that would promote this steady flow of amendments, whether it's having a regular convention or something like that. Look, it's just, we just observe historically that there is this pattern. I mean, I'm gonna explain in a moment, one of the reasons that is, in the 20th century, there were a couple of amendments sprinkled in the period between the progressive era and the civil rights era. And we kind of talk about them as a kind of a building wave that ended up just not materializing. At the end of the day, the reason we have these, I mean, I think it would be wonderful, by the way, if on a more regular basis, we kind of fine-tuned our constitution. I mean, not really nearly changing it, but we shouldn't have to wait 50 years to take care and to modernize the constitution. One of the reasons it happens is the requirement for a pretty broad consensus. You need two thirds of Congress or two thirds of the states. You need three quarters of the states. And so that tends to happen, that happens in a cyclical pattern in our country. If you look at the history of our country, we have periods where we're more polarized, where elections are more closely fought. Sometimes it leads to really paralyzing and troubling gridlock and dissatisfaction. But what seems to happen eventually is an election that kind of brings in a new governing majority. And in our history, they haven't lasted that long. The Reconstruction Congress, the huge progressive majorities that came to power in 1910 and 1912, 1912 progressive candidates won 74% of the vote after struggling for years to get attention. And then again, the new deal is an example of that. The reality is we don't get those opportunities very often. And because of the high bar of building consensus, I think we're always gonna have this situation where there's a building demand and then there's finally a window of opportunity to do it. And I'll just quickly add two points. One is that John and I live in New York. And so something New York does is every two decades, they put a question to the voters and they say, should we have this convention of lawmakers and what have you to amend or revise the state constitution? So some people think about other ways. This is also done around the world in different ways. Or there are scholars who promoted having a national referendum about certain questions of constitutional significance. So there are other ideas. We'd really have to think about what the consequences of them are. Because every decision you make, as we said, about amending the constitution has some sort of consequence, positive or negative. Amending the constitution outlaw, the sale of alcohol was not very bright and it was the only amendment that we repealed. And then just the other point is that amending the constitution is not the only way the constitution changes. So we have other ways that we change the meaning and the promise of our constitution. One of the most prominent ways we talk about is the Supreme Court. I'm a law professor, so we teach Supreme Court decisions all the time. And that really does change the constitution in big ways. As the Dred Scott decision tells you, right? As Marbury versus Madison, the most sort of fundamental core decision in constitutional law tells you. But we change the constitution through the political branches and we change the meaning through movements, right? So those are other ways that we do it. And those are ways to have that sort of elasticity in the constitution. So we can get some change or not in the stasis. But there are other ways we just really have to think about them, whether they're good ones for the US people. So we only have a few moments left. And I wanted to let you close with a plea for why Americans should care about this history of the amendments and why they should care about amending the constitution today. Obviously, you care about it, you wrote a book about it. So what would you tell to our fellow, we the people, why we should be more energized to be working with authors. So give us your pitch. You'll excuse our moment of pride and holding up our book, but this is a long time coming. So we wrote this book for two reasons. One was to challenge the kind of prevailing, defeatist point of view that it's too difficult or too dangerous to amend the constitution by reminding people that we've actually done it. But we also wrote the book so that people have a fuller understanding of what the constitution is. The constitution isn't just the yellow document trapped in that glass and titanium box. You know, it grew and changed and it's gonna continue and grow and change and that's really important. And so that's why we wrote this book. Yeah, and there's this famous saying, you all know it, those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Well, we think that we should learn from history this really important history and we should repeat it. We should learn from the past generations who taught us that the constitution is not frozen in time as John set up front, right? And then we want to tell the true history of the constitution. It's a history of how we the people have pushed for it to be amended to reshape it and to renew its democratic legitimacy over two centuries, right? Mending the constitution is hard, but the courts don't own the constitution. We the people do and it's time for we the people to be engaged in that constitution. Thank you so much. That was a great way to end. I encourage everyone to check out the people's constitution. I encourage you to look through the amendments there aren't that many, so you can get through them quickly, find inspiration from them. You wanna see how we at the constitutional accountability center litigate these amendments all the time in the courts, check us out at the usconstitution.org. And thank you so much for joining us at our national treasure, the National Archives. I hope everyone is well. Thank you, John and Wilfred. Thank you Elizabeth and thank you to the National Archives. Thank you.