Thomas Jefferson was wiser than he knew when he counseled against treating the Constitution as similar to the “ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched” or, more importantly, to be changed. All constitutions are human artifacts, and one must always remember the propensity to error of even the finest human beings (as we might concede most of the Framers to have been). They were creatures of their own time, well aware that the future would bring different realities and almost certainly require different solutions to problems of government, including basic questions of design....



