Jill Lepore

He's like, OK, really, we have to do this now.

Like, we have to do this.

So he's gone through the 200 plus proposed amendments from the states and he's whittled them down to this really interesting list of 12 and he introduces them.

So then there's a lot of debate in Congress about which of these they might send to the states.

And then they add some more, they take some away.

But once they decide that they're going to send them to the states, there's exactly, as you say, this question of like, well, what would it look like to amend this document?

Because what Madison has written isn't just like in paragraph two, line four, change the to theirs.

Like it's not like an edit, like a track changes.

It's a it's a list of new things.

It's the you know, it's like the First Amendment.

Congress shall not.

Congress shall not.

So it's a bill of rights.

And in the states, the bills of rights or declaration of rights appear usually at the top of the Constitution.

But they're their own separate section.

So partly it looks like, oh, these new this these amendments kind of are a set and they should maybe just appear at the end.

These people, Gnab calls them the supplementalists, like they'll be supplemental to the Constitution.

But then other people are like, yeah, but they contradict some of the stuff that's already in there.

So how would you read, like, how would you read a document that, like, part one says X, Y, and Z, and part two says not X, Z times two, X only on Fridays?

Like, it doesn't make any sense.