Is the U.S. Constitution too hard to change?

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• 00:03

  This is In Conversation from Apple News.

• 00:07

  I'm Shamita Basu.

• 00:08

  Today, is the U.S.

• 00:10

  Constitution too hard to change?

• 00:21

  Historian Jill Lapour has spent a lot of time studying and writing about the U.S.

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  Constitution.

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  And she says there's one big problem with it,

• 00:29

  a problem that feeds many other issues with our politics right now.

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  We're not amending it enough.

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  We have really abandoned the practice of convening to deliberate over fundamental law as citizens.

• 00:41

  There's a vicious circle in which partisanship and polarization make amending the Constitution more difficult,

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  and failing to amend the Constitution makes polarization and partisanship worse.

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  Jill has spent the past few years working on the amendments project,

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  a catalog that attempts to compile and classify every single attempt to revise the U.S.

• 01:02

  Constitution from 1789 to present day.

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  And that process has yielded a fascinating archive of what it could have shown us throughout our nation's history.

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  If you look at all the failed attempts to amend the Constitution, together,

• 01:16

  they constitute kind of an incredible record of the political yearnings of the American people.

• 01:22

  Just because amendment is almost impossible to achieve doesn't mean that what people propose is irrelevant,

• 01:27

  right?

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