Jill Lepore's stellar cover story rightly described the Constitution's amendment provision as a 'sleeping giant.' The process is indeed in sound slumber today, but history suggests that it will wake up. Amendments, history shows, come in cycles. The political factors that trigger those cycles always differ. But what precedes each wave of amendments is consistent: worsening polarization that escalates to violence, butting up against conventional wisdom that insists that amendments are not a viable solution. We are sadly at such a point, much as we were a decade or more before the first amendments of the Progressive era were ratified in 1913. Just prior, at the turn of the century, then-scholar Woodrow Wilson, the editorial board of The Washington Post, and the award-winning historian Herman Ames all claimed that the Constitution was unamendable. They were wrong. We should hope that the violence that finally stirs the giant will be less destructive than in cycles past. But I think we...
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