The irrelevance of constitutional amendments

Article V of the Constitution specifies how the Constitution may be amended . Notwithstanding all the attention that constitutional amendments receive, however, our constitutional order would look little different if a formal amendment process did not exist. At least since the first few, decades of t he Republic, constitutional amendments have not been an important means by which the Constitution, in practice, has changed. Many changes have come ab out without amendments. In some instances, even though amendments were reje cted, the late, changed in the way the failed amendments sought. Several am endments that were thought to be important in fact had little effect until society changed by other means. Other amendments did little more than ratif y changes that had already come about in other ways. If this thesis is corr ect, it suggests that precedents and other traditions are often as importan t as the text of the amended Constitution; that Political activity, in gene ral, should not focus on proposed constitutional amendments; and that Ameri can constitutional late, is best seen as the result of a complex, evolution ary process, rather than of discrete, self-consciously political acts by a sovereign People.