The U.S. Constitution’s Article V, writes Jill Lepore, is “a sleeping giant.”

It’s just hard to see what, in our current circumstance, is likely to wake it up.

Lepore assesses Article V, providing for amending the Constitution, in her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. She will be discussing the book, in one of the highlight events of this year’s Portland Book Festival, with OPB’s Geoff Norcross at 3:15 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 8, in the Newmark Theatre. Festival tickets provide admission but purchase of the book at $35 secures entry.

The industrially productive Lepore — she’s a history professor at Harvard and the author of a dozen books, from an extensive history of America to a biography of  Wonder Woman, as well as a staff writer at The New Yorker who seems to be in the magazine almost every other week — points out that the Constitution writers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 expected their work to be amended. In fact, they rapidly accepted 10 amendments, now known as the Bill of Rights. But since, the arduous route to amendment — two-thirds support in both houses of Congress, then ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures — has become an almost impassable route.

“They wanted it to be amendable,” argued Lepore in a recent telephone interview. “They could not have fathomed parties, partisanship, and the divisions of the country.

“If it hadn’t had an amendments section, it wouldn’t have been ratified. It turned out to be much harder than they thought.”

Since the original 10 amendments, two-and-a-half centuries have produced only 17 more — some simple housekeeping, one repealing a previous amendment — although as Lepore relates, literally thousands of amendments have been proposed, and some even sent out by Congress to the states. With the trenchlike political divisions of the moment, it’s hard to imagine an amendment gaining the broad support needed for Constitutional entry.

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It has never been easy. The 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments, ending slavery and seeking racial equal citizenship, took a civil war.  The major amendments of the Progressive Era, at the beginning of the 20^th century — the 16^th, allowing an income tax, the  17^th, shifting Senate choice from state legislatures to voters, and the 19th, giving the vote to women — were all, points out Lepore, “the product of decades-long struggle,” going back to the middle of the previous century. 

(On the edges of the political right, at the moment, there is some interest in repealing the 16^th and 17^th amendments. Votes for women seems safe.)

The casualty list of failed amendments is long. An Equal Rights Amendment against sex discrimination failed to gain states’ approval twice, in the 1920s and the 1970s. The Constitution provides for another amendment procedure, a second convention, which has never been used. Despite a convention’s products still needing ratification by three-quarters of the states, the idea of another convention, without George Washington or James Madison available, seems to terrify people.

With the daunting odds against amendment, notes Lepore, reformers have taken other approaches, through the courts or legislation. But “What the Supreme Court giveth, the Supreme Court can take away,” she points out, a principle that abortion rights supporters have recently had underlined to them 50 years after Roe v. Wade. The same fate can befall legislative gains, says Lepore, citing the ongoing gutting of the Voting Rights Act.

Without locking gains into the Constitution, Lepore argues, “The 1960s were not effective,” with many of its achievements now endangered.

On the other hand, right now the 14^th and 15^th amendments have their limitations in protecting voting rights as well.

We the People is a different kind of constitutional history. As Lepore notes, most constitutional histories are listings of Supreme Court decisions, which are seen as the shapers of the document and its meaning. But besides frequent stops at the high court, Lepore traces Americans’ belief in constitutions and the meetings that create them, beginning with surveys of Revolutionary-era state constitutional conventions before ever getting to Philadelphia, including tribal gatherings that set up structures even without eloquent preambles. A persistent pattern in the state documents, with creators including some who would be at Philadelphia, was a procedure for amendment.

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(The idea of changes extended beyond the document itself. As Lepore points out, James Madison, “The Father of the Constitution” whose notes on the convention have been used as a source for constitutional interpretation, kept amending and reworking those notes for decades before they became public.)

Over two-and-a-half centuries, the way people look at the Constitution also has changed. “One of the things the book does is trace those changes,” says Lepore, such as the rise of originalist thinking, the belief that the way to resolve constitutional issues is to consider what the delegates were thinking in 1787.

The book also relates that around the beginning of the 20^th century, many state constitutions became easier to amend, while the U.S. Constitution remained tightly fortified. Oregon is a strong example; from statehood through the rest of the century, when amendment was arduous, the state constitution remained untouched. After 1900, voters could amend it at any election, and the Oregon Constitution is now nearly the length of a Russian novel.

Right now is, of course, a fraught moment to be writing about the Constitution, with its meanings seemingly up for grabs daily in the Oval Office and the Supreme Court. But Lepore declares that her book takes a longer view. “It’s not a policy book,” she insists. “It’s not written for the present moment. It’s not a prescriptive book.”

Although the book notes some of the early Trump developments, she began it well before the current administration. Her perspective extends to a project called Democracy 2076, seeking to imagine what the Constitution and democracy should look like on the country’s 300^th birthday.

By then, Lepore will likely have written many more books and New Yorker pieces. Asked about her towering output, she says only, “I really enjoy what I do.”

Probably James Madison would have said the same.

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