This morning on Morning Joe on MSNBC, Linda Colley, professor of history at Princeton University and author of The Gun, The Ship, and the Pen, suggested that perhaps our founding fathers made it too hard to amend our constitution and that it is now severely out of step with the modern world.
She compared it to the second oldest constitution still in operation, that of Norway (1814), which she said had been amended numerous times and is constantly being amended even now, as circumstances require. Colley specifically noted that the Constitution makes no mention of political parties and is far more concerned with the threat of a landed aristocracy than with wealth accumulated and held by an increasingly small number of people--a plutocrat class.
Of course, changing the Constitution so that it is more easily amended would require, in and of itself, one of those very difficult to get amendments. And Colley readily noted that making any such changes now, in the midst of one of our most politically divided periods, could be perilous.
What was refreshing, however, was that when asked for how she would rectify the situation, she gave that rarely heard response on television: "I don't know."
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