Why the Constitution is making our politics worse (From the archives)

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  Hey there, it's Shamita.

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  I am still out on parental leave,

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  but in light of the 4th of July and the United States celebrating its 250th anniversary,

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  we wanted to bring you this episode from our archives about one of our founding documents, the U.S.

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  Constitution.

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  Enjoy.

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  This is In Conversation from Apple News.

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  I'm Shamita Basu.

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  Today, is the U.S.

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  Constitution too hard to change?

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  Historian Jill Lepore 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, 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.

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  There's a vicious circle in which...

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  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, a catalog

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

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