His article made me wonder: If we didn’t have a First Amendment, what kind of amendment would be able to win the supermajority support necessary to be added to the Constitution in today’s America? Is there any principle capable of resolving most or all of the policy disputes about church and state that has that kind of support? Or would people be willing to adopt an amendment that enacted a vague principle and left it to the courts to figure out the details? It seems to me that this thought experiment leads to an obvious answer: No. It would be impossible to enact such an amendment today. The one with the greatest likelihood of success might be some kind of local-option amendment, which left major decisions to shifting state and local majorities without supervision of the federal judiciary. I’m not saying that people would love this idea. If we were to have a constitutional convention, many people might well think it would be crazy to let Maryland establish a church if it wanted to. But I think it might well beat the alternatives.