Jill Lepore

They've made so many compromises and there's like so much blood on the floor by the time they get to Article 5.

People are like, all right, yeah, so it's going to be amendable.

But then there's a little bit of discussion of like, well, how would that work?

And so there's a few different plans and you could sort of see they're just like, all right, whatever, put it all in there.

Like, OK, so you can actually...

States can petition Congress to amend the Constitution, and that's a way to introduce a possible amendment.

States can also hold a convention.

There can be a second constitutional convention.

And if Congress passes an amendment and goes to the states for ratification, it can be ratified in a number of ways.

Like the state legislature can just vote on it or the state could decide to hold a ratifying convention.

And some of these things have been done and some of them have not been done.

We've never had a second constitutional convention.

It just failed as an idea.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, immediately after the Constitution is sent to the states for ratification in September of 1787...

Imagine that there was a new constitution and it went to the states today.

The first thing that would happen would be California would be like, well, we want this and this and this and it.

And Texas would say, we know we want this, this and this.

And Michigan would say, we like it just as it is.

But Minnesota would be like, we just have this one thing you want to add.