IT'S OK TO BE CONFUSED RANT

     The Framers at the Philadelphia convention made their new Constitution extremely difficult to amend. Amendments today, as on the day the Constitution was ratified, require a two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate, and ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. That’s why the document has only been amended 27 times in its 229-year existence. What’s more, if the first ten amendments - the Bill of Rights, fully ratified by 1791 - are subtracted from the total, only 17 amendments have been ratified in the more than 225 years that followed. Further, another six are mere tweaks to the system. Subtract these and we’re left with 11 major changes in more than two centuries.

     This difficulty undermines the position of many conservatives who insist that the Constitution be interpreted in the light of the framers’ and ratifiers’ original intent. If Madison and the boys didn’t expect applications of the Constitution to be affected by changing conditions, why would they make it so hard to amend? But I’m not here to quibble with the originalists among us. I’m here to write about what happens when a constitution is easy to change and to sound an old (and cliched) warning. Be careful what you wish for.

      Over the weekend, the Turkish people, in a referendum marked by fraud but technically open to all voters, profoundly altered their constitution, transferring power from a divided executive branch to a single, more-powerful President. That would be the Islamist, Recep Erdogan.

      The effort to amend modern Turkey’s founding document began with a consideration of the 21 proposed amendments by a Parliamentary Constitutional Commission which rejected three. The remaining eighteen then passed to the Turkish Parliament where they were voted on separately. Here we see the first great contrast between our system and theirs. As per Turkey’s amending process, amendments become law in two ways. Proposed amendments receiving 2/3 of the vote in Parliament simply take their place in the Turkish Constitution, whereas amendments that receive 3/5 of the vote must be ratified by a majority of the voters in a national referendum. Let the people decide.

      The American bar is set much higher. None of the Turkish amendments reached the 2/3 threshold, though each received the 60% necessary for a referendum. In the United States, this result would doom every amendment. Proposed amendments to our Constitution require approval by 2/3 of both legislatures, the House and the Senate. Turkey, of course, has a unicameral legislature. Further, the Turkish amendments were placed before the Turkish people for a single vote, whereas amendments to our Constitution, should they receive 2/3 of the votes in both Houses of Congress, would still have to be ratified by 75% of the states, each of which has a bicameral legislature. In case anyone’s counting, we’re talking about 76 legislative bodies in 38 states.

      The referendum in Turkey was very close, with 51% of the people approving the amendments. Even so, outside monitors, prevented in most cases from doing their jobs, have charged fraud on many levels, from ballot stuffing to the arrest of anti-referendum journalists. Still, it seems likely that Turkey, a NATO member, will now succumb to the lure of authoritarian rule. Erdogan uber alles.

      I’m not going to say that it can’t happen here, but I don’t believe authoritarian rule in the United States can be established by changing the Constitution. That would take a coup. Our problem lies at the other end of the spectrum. Originalists insist that our Constitution be interpreted exactly as the framers intended because the document allows for changes. Thus, if the American people don’t like the original meaning of the Interstate Commerce clause, they should rewrite it through the amending process, not reinterpret the text. There’s undeniable merit to that argument, but given our amending process, it leaves the nation with a founding document written on stone tablets, a bible frozen in time. And while a minority of Christian fundamentalists insist the Bible be understood literally word-for-word, most of today’s Christians, while acknowledging the Bible’s Divine origins, refuse to believe that the universe is 6,500 years old.

     Along with most of my friends, I have a Constitutional amendment wish-list. The Equal Rights Amendment heads the list, closely followed by a guaranteed right to health care and higher education. And how about an amendment declaring that our current Second Amendment does not confer an individual right to possess a gun? Or amendments declaring that political spending is not a form of free speech and that corporations are legal entities and not people?

      Given the amending process, I no longer hope to see any of the above ratified in my lifetime. On the other hand, I don’t expect a flag burning or anti-abortion amendment to pass either. So, don’t despair. In fact, next time you’re feeling down, glance from a photo of Recep Erdogan to one of Don the Con, whose every instinct is totalitarian. You’ll feel better. I promise.