Roman Mars

Here's another kind of dump site that we see a lot here in Bayview.

It looks like someone kind of put it near a garbage can and then left it on the sidewalk in the street.

Who determines the trash cans?

Even how they get picked up?

How are they maintained?

How are they designed?

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of the Constitution.

I'm Roman Mars.

Today, we are discussing Article 5, which lays out the ways to amend the Constitution.

And from the beginning of this series, we knew there was only one person we wanted to have for this episode, historian and writer Jill Lepore.

Jill is an American history professor at Harvard, a staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of one of my favorite books, These Truths, A History of the United States.

This fall, she published a new book, We the People, A History of the U.S.

Constitution.

And Jill tells the history of the Constitution through amendments, ones that succeeded and ones that failed.

Article 5 is just one long sentence, one long, boring sentence.

Here it is.

by the Congress, provided that no amendment shall be made prior to the year 1808 shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article, and that no state without its consent shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.

In her book, Jill Lepore argues that the Constitution is designed.

It is truly meant to be amended.

And before we go any further, it's important to define what a constitutional amendment really is, because the definition is broader than what most people probably think.