I've got a review of Larry Sabato's A More Perfect Constitution over at Barnes and Nobles' website. An excerpt:
The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg has noted that an alien observer would think us a society based upon ancestor worship, and that's not far from the truth. Thomas Jefferson and his cohort are our democracy's gods, and the Constitution is their gospel.It is into this strange situation that Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, strides. His new book, A More Perfect Constitution, is a welcome blast of the profane within this unwarranted hush: it dares us to consider the Constitution a mere document, the product of messy compromises, occasional shortsightedness, and, most important, its times (the Constitution was, lest we forget, composed over 200 years ago). It reminds us that the Founding Fathers considered it decidedly limited in relevance, and that Jefferson himself held that "every Constitution...naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right." And it drives home, in great detail and with admirable clarity, a variety of ways in which the Constitution hinders the smooth function of the modern state.In its basic thrust, Sabato's is a broadly agreeable thesis. The lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges is lunacy, encouraging presidents to nominate the young over the wise and rendering vacancies random and disruptive. The Electoral College is virulently undemocratic, second in offensiveness only to the absurd apportionment of the United State Senate, where 41 Senators representing 11.2 percent of the population can use the filibuster to effectively block any and all legislation. And let's be honest: the Second Amendments is, if not poorly written, in need of an editor's pen.Moreover, Sabato reminds us that constitutions are not, by nature, sacred documents, approachable only by a priestly class and amendable only by God Almighty. Between the 50 states comprising the Union there have been more than 92 constitutional conventions, with the original 13 states alone overseeing the creation of 40 new constitutions. If they can do it, why can't we?
