Jill Lepore

It was completely non-controversial at the convention in 1787.

Everyone understood this thing had to be amendable.

No one was going to ratify it if it couldn't be changed.

So that's where it comes from.

But the

Provision itself is, it's kind of a pig's breakfast.

Like it's got all these compromises in it.

And they just sort of guessed about what might be the right bar.

Like they have this Goldilocks problem, right?

Like they're writing constitution.

They want it to be amendable.

But they don't want it to be impossible to amend it.

It needs to be amendable, but they don't want it to be too easy to amend it because they want the thing to be sort of stable and, you know, get its legs before people start knocking it over.

So they come up with this double supermajority provision, right?

The two thirds of both houses of Congress have to pass it.

Then it goes to the states and three quarters of the states have to ratify it.

And I don't know, that doesn't seem crazy from the vantage of 1787, but it turns out very quickly, it's much harder to achieve that double supermajority than they anticipated.

Yeah, I mean, they have, they don't, they don't give this enough attention is one thing to say.

Like, remember, like, they don't even get to this question.

It's, it's,