Impeachment: A Citizen's Guide

by Cass R. Sunstein

Those who believe in a living Constitution claim that the document contains abstract and open-ended terms whose meaning legitimately evolves in ways that the founding generation could not have imagined. Sometimes they enlist one of the greatest thinkers of that very generation, Thomas Jefferson, to support their argument: Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. . . . I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. . . . [T]he dead have no rights.4