The Many American Constitutions AMERICA ’ S FORGOTTEN CONSTITUTIONS

For all the disagreement and polarization that mark modern American politics, one commitment that enjoys wide-ranging support—able to unite even hardened foes on the right and on the left—is faith in the essential goodness of the federal Constitution. Members of both major political parties often clamor to display their constitutional loyalty, from establishing Constitution Day as a national holiday1 to reading from the text to begin new sessions of Congress2 to habitually invoking its wisdom during speeches and addresses.3 But in recent years, the halo around the Constitution appears to have fractured ever so slightly. Today, it has become almost a fad among legal scholars to attack the Constitution as outmoded and ill equipped to meet current political needs. The pages of The New Yorker discuss worries about whether the Constitution is “broken.”4 Various books declare the United States to be a “frozen republic”5 or a “republic[] lost”6 and call for “constitutional disobedience”7