The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended. “The whole purpose of the Constitution,” Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia once said, “is to prevent a future society from doing whatsoever it wants to do.” 1 This is not true. One of the Constitution’s founding purposes was to prevent change. Another was to allow for change without violence. Amendment is so essential to the American constitutional tradition, so methodical and so entire a conception of endurance through adaptation, that it can best be described as a philosophy.
