Darren Guerra, a member of Values & Capitalism’s faculty network and associate professor of political science at Biola University has just published a book titled “Perfecting the Constitution: The Case for the Article V Amendment Process”:
“He who can change the Constitution controls the Constitution. So who does control the Constitution? The answer has always been: ‘the people’. The people control the Constitution via the Article V amending process outlined in the Constitution. Article V has always provided a means of perfecting the Constitution in an explicit, democratically authentic, prudent, and deliberative manner. In recent years Article V has come under attack by influential legal scholars who criticize it for being too difficult, undemocratic, and too formal. Such scholars advocate for ignoring Article V in favor of elite adaptation of the Constitution or popular amendment through national referendums. This book shows that, to the contrary, Article V is a unique and powerful extension of the American tradition of written constitutionalism. And a positive case is made that Article V remains the most clear and powerful way to register the sovereign desires of the American public with regard to alterations of their fundamental law. In the end, Article V is an essential bulwark to maintaining a written Constitution that secures the rights of the people against both elites and their own unreflective voice.”
“He who can change the Constitution controls the Constitution. So who does control the Constitution? The answer has always been: ‘the people’. The people control the Constitution via the Article V amending process outlined in the Constitution. Article V has always provided a means of perfecting the Constitution in an explicit, democratically authentic, prudent, and deliberative manner.
In recent years Article V has come under attack by influential legal scholars who criticize it for being too difficult, undemocratic, and too formal. Such scholars advocate for ignoring Article V in favor of elite adaptation of the Constitution or popular amendment through national referendums.
This book shows that, to the contrary, Article V is a unique and powerful extension of the American tradition of written constitutionalism. And a positive case is made that Article V remains the most clear and powerful way to register the sovereign desires of the American public with regard to alterations of their fundamental law. In the end, Article V is an essential bulwark to maintaining a written Constitution that secures the rights of the people against both elites and their own unreflective voice.”
