Jill Lepore

Yeah, so I...

I was teaching a class where I was having my students do a mock constitutional convention.

I had one of them to prepare constitutional amendments all semester.

And one of their early assignments early in the semester was going to be like, look up if anyone has ever tried to do the thing that you're proposing.

Part of your white paper would need to be a previous effort.

So let's say you wanted to add a voting rights amendment or something.

you know, you were supposed to include like who and when and had ever proposed such an amendment and what had been its fate.

And it turned out that was really hard to do because we don't even really, we just don't have much of a sense of the failed amendments.

So I ended up getting a grant from the great and now gone national down for the humanities to spend some years devising a fully searchable public archive, digital archive of every attempt to meaningfully amend the U.S.

Constitution.

So it's

You know, thousands and thousands and thousands of amendments, like some 12,000 that were introduced on the floor of Congress.

And again, like, as you say, only 27 ever were ratified.

So I did that mainly just for the sake of my, I thought like more people than me would like to do this exercise as a class exercise.

But it actually was really, really interesting.

And in reading about other people's efforts to compile a record of the failed constitutional amendments, this one guy in like 1876 or maybe it was 1887, like a century after the Constitution was written, said, you know, I've been studying these things.

It turns out like.

it's an incredibly meaningful record of the political aspirations of the American people to look at the failed amendments.

Right.

And I thought that was true.