How To Fix Our Broken Constitution
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Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
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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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | MI5 Official Secrets. |
| 0:03.0 | Head to the National Archives in queue to discover a hidden world of espionage. |
| 0:07.0 | In the first exhibition of its kind, |
| 0:09.0 | dozens of previously unseen top secret MI5 files are on display, |
| 0:15.0 | revealing real-life spy stories more fascinating than fiction. |
| 0:19.0 | MI5 Official Secrets is a free exhibition. |
| 0:23.1 | Visit now, no booking required. |
| 0:25.4 | What will you uncover? |
| 0:27.1 | Tap the banner to find out more. |
| 0:34.6 | I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the Supreme Court and the law. |
| 0:46.7 | Hello, how are you doing? It has been one hell of a week. Another one in which the outrages grow more outrageous and our |
| 0:56.5 | path to equal justice under the law grows narrower and more perilous. I'm thinking just |
| 1:04.1 | off the top of my head about the government's attempt to deport hundreds of children that |
| 1:08.9 | it rounded up, send them to Guatemala in the middle of the night, of troops in the streets, and extrajudicially blowing up foreign vessels, and of canceled vaccines. |
| 1:21.1 | Mark Joseph Stern and I are going to be tackling some of these outrages in our bonus episode for Plus members. |
| 1:26.2 | You can listen to it right after this one. |
| 1:29.9 | But first. |
| 1:31.6 | We've kind of left the idea of amendment behind, and it is meant to be the thing that you can do so that you don't kill one another. |
| 1:39.2 | And that's what's so beautiful about it, right? |
| 1:41.4 | Like this will be the protection against insurrection, |
| 1:45.1 | against the United States devolving into insurrectionary politics. If we could just fix |
| 1:49.5 | things on our own when things aren't working well, then we will be sure that we won't start |
... |
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