Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia exposes thirteen falsities often employed in interpreting the Constitution and offers his own constitutional amendment.
“I am sometimes asked if I would amend any provision of the Constitution, and actually the one provision I would amend is the amendment provision. It is very, very difficult to amend it, infinitely more difficult than it was when that provision was written. It takes a two-thirds vote of each House to propose the amendment and then it has to be approved by three-quarters of the states. I figured it out once, if you took a bare majority in the smallest states by population, something less than 2 percent of the population could prevent a constitutional amendment. That is probably too severe and certainly much worse than it was. The disparity in population between California and Rhode Island is so much greater than what existed at the framing. I would amend that.”