How To Fix Our Broken Constitution

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, Government, News

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There is a “stuckness” to American political life right now, which has become a seemingly inexorable centrifuge of polarization, victimization and power grabbing. The constitution is brandished as sword and shield, and also as though it is the word of God. Americans, it seems, have lost the ability to think creatively and expansively about the constitution, and our ability to amend it. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in conversation with Jill Lepore, whose new book “We The People: A History of The U.S. The Constitution is a thorough and bold excavation of a central, but utterly neglected part of America’s constitutional scheme: the amendment process. In her book, and in this interview, Lepore challenges Americans to rekindle their constitutional imaginations and really think about what the act of mending, repairing, or amending has meant through the nation’s history, and could mean for a country on the brink. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:20.2	I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and the law.
0:32.1	Hello, how are you doing? It has been one hell of a week. Another one in which the outrages grow more
0:40.7	outrageous and our path to equal justice under the law grows narrower and more perilous.
0:48.0	I'm thinking just off the top of my head about the government's attempt to deport hundreds
0:53.0	of children that it rounded up, send
0:55.4	them to Guatemala in the middle of the night, of troops in the streets, and extrajudicially
1:01.4	blowing up foreign vessels, and of canceled vaccines. Mark Joseph Stern and I are going to be
1:07.9	tackling some of these outrages in our bonus episode for Plus members.
1:11.8	You can listen to it right after this one. But first. We've kind of left the idea of amendment behind,
1:19.2	and it is meant to be the thing that you can do so that you don't kill one another. And that's what's so
1:25.6	beautiful about it, right? Like, this will be the protection
1:28.6	against insurrection, against the United States devolving into insurrectionary politics.
1:33.7	If we could just fix things on our own when things aren't working well, then we will be sure
1:39.7	that we won't start killing one another. There's a creeping sense that the United States is just broken and broken in ways that are
1:48.3	unfixable. But today's show is about rekindling the possibility of repair.
	...

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