The Parchment Is Not Enough

National Review opens with a sober observation: at 239 years old, the Constitution has been a remarkable success — but it may not make it to 250. I find myself drawn to that framing with something close to alarm, because the concern is not new. I raised it myself in the early years of the republic, and I raise it again now through the only instrument available to me: argument.

The Constitution was never designed to govern angels. I wrote in Federalist No. 51 that if men were angels, no government would be necessary — and if angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls would be necessary. The document's architecture assumes the opposite: that ambition, faction, and the hunger for power are permanent features of human nature. The genius of the arrangement was to make those forces check one another, so that no branch, no faction, and no temporary majority could consolidate power at the expense of the whole.

What I would ask any reader to consider — and what I infer the National Review piece is gesturing toward, though I have only its lead before me — is this: the Constitution is weakened not only by dramatic violation but by slow institutional erosion. When the legislature habitually delegates its hardest choices to the executive, the separation of powers hollows out from within. When the executive treats emergency power as a permanent condition, the emergency exception swallows the rule. When the bench is understood by all parties as a political prize rather than an independent tribunal, its decisions lose the legitimacy that makes them binding without force.

Each of those tendencies was visible in embryo in my own era. The difference between then and now — and here I speak by inference, not by recollection — is one of scale and speed. The extended republic I described in Federalist No. 10 was meant to frustrate faction by multiplying it: so many interests competing across so large a territory that no single faction could long dominate. But if the mechanisms of representation themselves are captured — by money, by concentrated media, by partisan manipulation of district lines — then the extended republic no longer performs its function. The sphere is large, but the filter is broken.

The remedy the framers built into the compact is amendment under Article V. That process is deliberately difficult, requiring broad consensus across branches and states. It is not a flaw — it is the point. Fundamental change should require a supermajority because fundamental change, done hastily by a bare majority, is how republics collapse. What is dangerous is not the difficulty of formal amendment but the temptation to achieve the same effect informally: through executive order, through judicial interpretation stretched past recognition, through legislative inaction that lets agencies write the law no Congress would dare to pass openly.

The Constitution will reach 250 if — and I believe only if — the people who hold office under it, and the citizens who elect those officeholders, recover the habit of treating it as a binding compact rather than a flexible suggestion. A written constitution either binds or it does not. If it does not bind the powerful, it does not protect the powerless. That is the structural question every generation must answer for itself. Ours answered it imperfectly, as National Review's lead implicitly concedes. The question is whether the present generation will answer it at all.