At present, the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution still in force and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to amend or improve. There have only been 27 amendments since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Some broadly popular reforms — from overturning Citizens United to guaranteeing equal rights regardless of sex — never make it into the Constitution, no matter how many Americans support them. The American people widely agree that the system is broken and needs to change, but unlike other constitutions, ours provides no reasonable means for evolution. To keep our democracy responsive and legitimate, we need a more accessible way to amend the Constitution — we need to change the way we change.
The American Constitution is deliberately frozen in place. Article V sets a nearly insurmountable bar: Any amendment requires two-thirds approval in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and ratification by three-quarters of the states. In practice, this means that just 13 states representing a small minority of Americans can block any change, no matter how widely supported. More than 11,000 amendments have been formally proposed in U.S. history, meaning only 0.2% have made it through this gauntlet. Even amendments like the Equal Rights Amendment, which had widespread support, were unable to pass this high bar.
Other democracies have proven that constitutions can evolve without losing their legitimacy. France, for instance, has cycled through multiple constitutions and amended its current one more than 20 times since 1958, adjusting institutions as society has changed. Germany’s Basic Law, written in the ashes of World War II, was deliberately designed to adapt while preserving democratic guardrails. In Canada and India, too, constitutional change has been a normal, recurring feature of politics rather than an impossible mountain to climb. Stability does not require rigidity, and flexibility has often been democracy’s best safeguard.
The cost of this rigidity is not abstract. It shows up in the everyday failures of American governance. We live under rules that almost everyone agrees are outdated, but which no one has the power to change. Gerrymandering continues to warp elections. The Electoral College misfires with alarming regularity. Campaign finance reform is a fantasy. Even basic voting rights — supposedly the bedrock of democracy — are subject to partisan sabotage. We’re stuck because the only body that can propose such changes is the very Congress that benefits from the status quo.
Because amendments are near-impossible, Americans have turned to the courts as a substitute. For much of the 20th century, that seemed like a workable path: The Chief Justice Earl Warren Supreme Court expanded civil rights and voting protections through bold reinterpretations of constitutional text. But judicial change is fragile. What one court gives, another can take away. The Chief Justice John Roberts Supreme Court has dismantled campaign finance limits and gutted the Voting Rights Act, undoing decades of precedent. None of those outcomes reflected new amendments or broad national consensus — only the views of a handful of unelected justices serving life terms.
This is the paradox of our system. A Constitution too rigid to be changed by the people is constantly being reshaped by judges. Instead of democracy guiding law, law is bent to the philosophy of whichever justices hold power. And that makes our government feel less like a reflection of the people’s will, and more like a hostage to chance and timing.
Critics will say that this is how it should be. The Constitution was never meant to be easy to change. If majorities could rewrite it on a whim, minority rights would be constantly at risk. The supermajority thresholds in Article V are supposed to protect us from passion, from overreaction, from the tyranny of the moment.
There’s truth in that argument. Constitutional change should be difficult. The problem is that ours isn’t just difficult — it’s paralyzing. It’s one thing to demand broad consensus; it’s another to make reform nearly impossible. No other democracy asks for this much agreement across so many veto points.
It could be said that we don’t need easier amendments at all — that reinterpretation by the courts has already served as a pressure valve. After all, the Constitution means something very different today than it did in 1788, thanks to decades of judicial innovation. But relying on judges as our only vehicle for change carries its own danger. Judges are not elected. They serve for life. And their decisions can swing wildly from one generation to the next, not because the people demanded it, but because a few vacancies opened under a particular president.
Even the irony here proves the point: The only way to fix our amendment process is with an amendment. A document designed to evolve has become a document that traps itself. The risk is not that Americans will change the Constitution too often. It’s that we will stop being able to change it at all. And that is exactly why we need a model that allows citizens themselves — not just Congress or the courts — to drive reform when a broad majority of the country agrees it is necessary.
So what would change actually look like? The point isn’t to make the Constitution flimsy or disposable. It’s to make it answerable to the people it governs.
Michigan already offers a model. Here, citizens can gather signatures to put constitutional amendments directly on the ballot. If voters approve, the change becomes law — no permission slip from the legislature required. Imagine scaling that nationally: require signatures from, say, 5% of the population across multiple states, then put the amendment before the people. If 65% of voters approve, it passes. That’s not mob rule. That’s overwhelming agreement, the kind of consensus our current system pretends to require but never delivers.
None of this would make change easy. It would still demand massive organizing and broad support. But it would give citizens a tool they don’t currently have: a way to fix a system everyone knows is broken, without begging gridlocked politicians or lifetime judges to do it for them.
The Constitution was written to endure, but endurance without adaptability becomes fragility. We have built a system where nearly everyone agrees change is needed, yet almost no change is possible. That is not stability. That is paralysis.
Making amendments possible again would not weaken the Constitution — it would save it. It would remind us that the document belongs to us, not the other way around. If our democracy is to remain alive, we need to change the way we change. A Constitution that cannot move with its people will eventually leave them behind.
Seth Gabrielson is an Opinion Columnist who writes about the intersection of politics, science and philosophy in his biweekly column “Public Reason.” He can be reached at semiel@umich.edu.
