Major funding for questioning the constitution was provided by Paul and Victoria Saunders and by J. Thornton Kirby.

Questioning the Constitution was produced in collaboration with the University of Virginia's Center for politics.

It's looked at is the gold standard by not only, you know, people here who who bother to take a look at the Constitution, but also by people throughout the world who were trying to get their their governments in place.

It doesn't take very long to read the Constitution.

I mean, you know, any of your viewers, I mean, look, there it is.

That's not a very big thing to go ahead and read.

It's all in there.

People in power will not protect our democracy for us.

They have power.

They like power.

Democrats want to get their way.

Republicans want to get their way.

People have to push back and remind people of what these constitutional principles are.

I think there are things that should change when when I look at the Constitution, and I think there are things the Constitution should put in place.

I think probably it's time to revisit the Constitution.

Jefferson said, very appropriately, a little revolution now and then is a good thing.

And indeed it is.

It applies as much to our time as it did to his.

It is laid the cornerstone to be, and I repeat, the oldest continuously functioning democratic republic on earth today.

All others have gone into the dustbin of history.

Don't tinker with it.

The Constitution, in a sense, provides the conscience of America.

And what that means is that the Constitution has these values about how we live together as Americans.

We respect our institutions.

We tolerate these opposing views even though we fight like crazy for them.

We don't feel that it's always winner take all.

You know, it's easy for us to just say, I want my way, I want my way.

You know?

I want to get this in the budget, I want this I want my way on immigration.

I want my way on gay marriage.

I want my way on this.

I want it on this.

It's hard to remember that there are other people in America who don't share that view.

And that the Constitution doesn't say I the people.

It says we the people.

I think the Constitution on the holds.

This is a marvelous document.

And, it achieved what the framers set out to achieve at the time, which was to create a country strong enough not to be reconquered by the European powers.

And that was really what was on their minds.

Their constitution, however, was marred by really, really unconscionable compromises which they knew at the time were not right.

We still labor under some of the effects of those, unforgivable compromises, and we we need to address it.

Our constitution goes off the rails much more often than people realize, because they have been taught that it's perfect and God knows it isn't that.

When I think of the Constitution and what it means for me, I gotta back up a little bit.

Because if you look at the preamble, it says we the people in order to form a more perfect union.

And it begs the question, who are we, the people?

It wasn't We the people, Native Americans at that point that the Constitution was written.

But I've never lost the dream or the hope.

And I begin to see the reality that the Constitution does apply to me.

I can go into public restaurants and have a meal.

I can go to public libraries and check out a book.

Those things are very near and dear to me because in my early years I couldn't do that.

I couldn't go in public restaurants.

I remember going to Oklahoma as a kid to see my brothers graduate from college, and we went to this, this, service station.

And I had to go to the bathroom and and the bathrooms were labeled white and colored.

I said, dad, where do I go?

I said, there's no place for me to go.

And I was like, six years old.

Of course, he sits on come with me.

And he fixed it.

But the bottom line is, at that point in time, I was denied some basic rights that other people took for granted.

So the Constitution, I love it.

As it becomes more actualized, I see my place and I defend it.

When it really hit me, probably what the Constitution really meant to me personally was when I came to West Point.

I am walking where people like Grant and Eisenhower and MacArthur walked, and here am I, you know, a little Hispanic girl from New York City taking the oath to support and defend the Constitution.

It is an empowering thing to take upon ourselves, each one as citizens, in the military, as civilians.

This enormous responsibility that the Constitution places on all of us because it comes from this idea that the government is, is of the people, by the people, for the people.

In 1787, I'm told our founding fathers did agree to write a list of principles of keeping people free.

When I was a kid, there was a children's show that sang The Constitution.

Schoolhouse Rock.

That's right.

It is phenomenal.

And how that left an imprint still to this day.

We the people, in order for the world perfect union young, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility.

I love it.

It's good stuff.

I think the times we live in now, where there's so much going on and there's so much hankering to change the Constitution to do this to the Constitution.

I think people need to fundamentally understand and appreciate it for what it is as it is.

United States of America, How many times have I referred to this magnificent instrument, which I often think it was?

It's almost by divine providence that these men gathered together and at that hot constitutional convention and worked on it those period of time.

And you know what Franklin said when he walked out and a press person asked him, what have you wrought?

And he said, a document, a republic, if you can keep it.

And that's been tested many times, and we've kept it.

No, I think our Constitution has stood the test of time.

I think we are the envy of other nations.

Many countries have followed basically our constitution.

The three separate branches, and they could pretty well clearly define, co-equal and, the checks and balances.

Sometimes I think, there they're more checks and balances because the way the Constitution is drafted, you know, things proceed very slowly in government.

Maybe that was the intent of the drafters, but sometimes things never seem to get done.

People often say it would be wrong to change what the founders did.

They need to go back and read what the founders said.

They were pretty consistent about expecting us to have regular constitutional conventions.

They wanted each generation to reconsider what they had done.

Thomas Jefferson maybe was the most radical and, suggesting that there ought to be a new constitution every generation, 19 years in his time.

We certainly don't need a constitutional convention every 19 years.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a constitutional convention in the first decade of every new century.

Even if we change.

Not a word.

It would be a marvelous opportunity for civic education.

People would learn about the Constitution.

The Constitution serves more than one purpose.

That's the most simple and technical level.

It is the set of instructions to those who hold government power.

It's in the preamble that the framers have spelled out the lofty purposes of government.

The general welfare, the common defense, and other purposes like that.

I think if you linger over that language, then you begin to see what the philosophical or policy assumptions are that underlie the whole federal enterprise.

So you begin with the preamble.

And then as you move through the body of the document, it's actually fairly logically organized.

Article one is the legislative article.

That's the article that essentially establishes Congress says what Congress has powers may be.

So article one, quite simply is the legislative branch.

Article two is the executive branch provides for the presidency essentially to provide for the execution of the laws.

There's some debate over whether there is inherent power in the presidency, but it does make him commander in chief as well as being the chief executive officer.

Article three is the article that provides for the judicial system.

It says there shall be a Supreme Court.

Finally, as you move towards the latter part of the Constitution, you begin to get to things like supremacy and change.

You look to the future, in effect.

So you start with the statement of purpose.

The preamble.

You set up the three branches of government.

You flesh out the federal system and you look to the future.

Of course, it contains lots of complicated implications.

Interpreting it, applying it, making it work creates volumes of constitutional law.

I mean, this is tradition, you know, it's just like it's the little things.

It's the little things that involve things that the courts can't see.

The people can't see.

If women come here, it'll be like, you know, it'll be like, yeah, it's because the way it is now is because it's all male.

And as soon as they come here, it'll change.

So they still won't be gaining anything, not just culture.

We actually do teach the case involving VMI.

It's the US versus Virginia.

And it talks about these stereotypes that were pretty much enshrined in some ways in the law.

And the way cases were being decided that men had a certain sphere where they were going to be active in and that they were capable in.

And then women had another, more limited sphere.

And it wasn't in in the same sphere which would allow women to be leaders, women to go into the military, women to contribute as well as men do.

In the VMI case, it was the Department of Justice that was suing the state of Virginia on behalf of all the citizens of Virginia and particularly, those young women who wish to avail themselves of the educational opportunities at Virginia military Institute, which was a state institution.

The VMI case was an opportunity for actually Justice Ginsburg, who had been one of the champions of women's rights in the 70s and case by case as an advocate litigating in front of the Supreme Court.

Now, she was on the Supreme Court, so she was able to write the majority opinion there.

And so that's just one of those examples where a very difficult and controversial at the time decision is made.

Now we can say whether we agree with the decision or not, or whether we agree with the rationale or not.

But as Americans, we all agree the process is that the courts will determine that and that the Supreme Court will be the ultimate arbiter of what a phrase in the Constitution means.

Prior to the Constitution, we had a country in disarray.

Our foreign predators were hanging out, waiting for us to fall apart.

France.

England.

Spain.

It was insanity.

Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson all bemoaned the possibility of maintaining a nation.

The Constitutional Convention is a model of compromise.

And these were people as diverse, relatively speaking, as we are now.

They came from different religions, which actually had meaning.

They came from states that were as distant and different as nations are today.

And they did not like each other, but they understood the great need to create the we So they made many compromises.

You have to imagine, when the framers were working on the what became our constitution, the challenge that they were confronted frankly didn't yet know what a constitution ought to look like.

How do we write this Constitution?

Give the government the powers that it needs, that we think it needs to make America a great nation, but at the same time, quiet the doubts and fears of people who said, no, that much power is bound to be tyrannical.

James Madison was certainly one of the key figures who came up with a plan, and took that with him to Philadelphia.

Many parts of Madison's plan were not finally adopted, but Madison had the political sense, the tactical sense to realize that he would have to make some compromises.

And the main thing was to come out of the convention with a plan that worked.

He proposed and wanted representation in the Congress to be based on population.

The more people in a state, the power they represent in Congress, other people in Philadelphia, in particular from the small states, were worried that the big states like Massachusetts and Virginia and New York would basically swallow up the rest of them, and they would be outvoted, outnumbered, and therefore they would be threatened by that kind of arrangement.

So the counterproposal to Philadelphia was essentially a plan that would have given each state equal representation.

The middle ground of a sense was fairly obvious.

Well, we'll split the difference.

We'll have the House of Representatives based on population.

We'll have the Senate based on states equalities, and therefore both the people and the states will somehow both be represented in the legislative process.

On the executive, that, again, was a compromise.

They weren't willing to go as far as to have a popularly elected president.

This was not the mindset of 18th century framers, but they also thought they should not have the president elected by, let's say, the Senate or by Congress, because that would make the executive dependent upon the legislative branch, and that would not be a sufficient separation of powers.

As the convention moved along.

They finally came up with what we know is the Electoral College, a very cumbersome and awkward kind of arrangement.

It actually made more sense at the time, because smaller country leadership knew each other, and they certainly knew that the Electoral College would get together, and they knew who the first president would be was going to be George Washington.

Well, that worked all right for a time or two.

But as we know today, it's a little bit hard to explain or justify.

One of the key compromises made in Philadelphia was to build in certain protections for slavery.

What they realized is that you couldn't have a constitution in the first place, unless you appeased the minority of well-placed slaveholders.

The southern states wanted to have power in Congress proportionate to their population, and they at first said we should get representation for all their slaves as well as free people.

Well, the northern states said, but no, absolutely not.

I mean, what is what what's the deal?

Are they property or are they people?

You can't have it both ways.

But they made it clear they were going to walk out.

Isn't it remarkable, knowing what we now know about the American history, the problem of slavery, sectionalism, the Civil War, reconstruction.

Slavery is still with us in the civil rights movement of the night of the 20th century.

And the problems today of it may not be slavery as such, but we still have the lingering problems of race.

Given all that American history.

Isn't it remarkable that when you read the Constitution, the word slavery never appears?

The Constitution seems not to talk about slaves.

The framers of the Constitution agreed to what is called the 3/5 compromise, namely, that in deciding the basis of representation in the House of Representatives, that you would count not only free population, but 3/5 of other persons, other persons being a euphemism for slaves.

So the southern states wanted slaves to be counted one on one to swell their population.

Northern states would have preferred the slaves not be counted at all.

And so finally they just in effect came up with this 3/5 compromise so that the text of the Constitution talks about 3/5 of other persons.

That, of course, is now, a moot point.

I mean, that language no longer has any legal effect because of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but it's still in there.

We, the disinherited of this land, we who had been oppressed so long.

I'm tired of going through the long night of captivity.

Now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.

And the civil rights movement.

There's a great moment.

It's December 5th, 1955.

The first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association is being held.

This is the beginning of the bus boycott.

Rosa Parks been arrested four days earlier.

People have stayed off the busses for one day now.

Thousands of them are gathered in a church in Montgomery.

And so many that thousands are standing on the street outside listening to this on loudspeaker.

And this new young minister in town, Martin Luther King, who most of them don't know, never heard of, don't know anything at all about him, has been chosen the leader of this group.

And he has to give the reasons why we're here.

And in a relatively brief speech, maybe 20, 25 minutes, he says something that's just so powerful.

He says we're not wrong because if we are wrong, the Supreme Court is wrong.

And in 1955, no black people think the Supreme Court is wrong.

And the year before it is just ruled against segregated schools.

How could that be wrong?

Then he says, if we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong, and nobody then or now thinks the Constitution is really wrong.

And then he says, if we're wrong, then Jesus Christ is wrong.

Of course, when you're speaking in the whole street Baptist Church, there's nobody there who thinks Jesus Christ is or ever could be wrong.

But it's this endorsement of the Constitution, this embrace of the Constitution that not only that King articulates, but that everyone in the room, no matter how unlettered they may be, embraces with him.

And we are not alone.

We are not wrong in what we are doing.

If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.

If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.

If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.

He knew from that basic American understanding of it that this is the document that says, I'm a person.

And as a person, I have all the rights.

Every other person has no more, no less.

And the fact that I now have less means that I've got to use this document to make sure I have an equal amount.

It took a long time for the country to come to a consciousness that we've been treating a portion of our population badly.

We've denied them the right to vote.

We've denied them the ordinary protections of police.

We've denied them just elemental, basic human rights, and we've treated them awfully.

A movement arose, and the movement eventually won the hearts and minds of the American people in the hearts and minds of the Congress of the United States.

And because of a courageous president, Lyndon Johnson helped set right what had been wrong for 100 years.

Now, along the way, there are many, many victories, court victories won by the NAACP and other organizations, and these court victories depended on forging a new interpretation of the Constitution and new enforcement of what the Constitution said.

So the 1960s is when all of what has been wrong is set right.

The delegates of Philadelphia were, on the one hand, I think, statesmen.

They understood the needs of the nation, but they also had to take the package back to their respective states to sell it.

And the states were required to ratify the Constitution if it was going to go into effect.

The Philadelphia Convention didn't provide for a bill of rights.

The so-called Anti-Federalist, those who were opposed to the new Constitution, who thought it was dangerous and tyrannical, seized on the issue of the lack of a Bill of rights.

Madison and the other proponents of ratification were obliged to agree.

Just let's ratify the Constitution, and we will undertake to add a bill of rights.

It was a very close call, and Virginia and New York nearly defeated it.

If Virginia and New York had not ratified, they would be obliged to go back to the drafting board.

And it's not at all clear that a second time around they could have actually brought the Constitution to them.

So the states did ratify, and at the first Congress.

Madison, as a member of that Congress, was as good as his word.

He undertook to see that a bill of rights was proposed.

Of course, those were amendments that had to be in also ratified by the states, but they were.

So that's how the Bill of rights came into being, and which we simply take them for granted, as surely they must have been there from the start.

Constitution and constitutional law ought to be given in every high school in the United States.

And I mean that I made that point during the Watergate hearings, when we'd have all these officers of the United States government, military and civilian stand up there that had gone ahead and flouted the Constitution in every which way.

And I asked, have you ever read the Constitution?

You have, of course, said, no.

Well, I'm here.

The men that raised, the women that raise their right hand swearing to uphold the Constitution, which they've never read.

So the answer is that's an enormously important part of anything that we do for the future has to teach our young people the Constitution.

Most people out there don't have the foggiest idea of what on.

You cannot write a law that's going to stop any sort of illegal behavior.

You might make it more difficult, but people want to misbehave.

They're going to misbehave.

It's up to those that are responsible for oversight, for enforcing the law to do that.

And that was a great test.

Had Richard Nixon succeeded and the committee, the Senate and House failed, we would have been a pretty sad state of affairs here in the United States.

We made a conscious decision that our politics wasn't going to sink to his level, and we weren't going to allow him to trample the Constitution.

The whole thing was about presidential power and going ahead and not allowing him to to exceed his powers.

Issue after issue that was raised, whether it was the break ins or spying, or the language of the president himself, or the orders of the president, the disregard of justice, I mean, just flew in the face of the entire Constitution of the United States.

And it was in that broad sense, really, that Richard Nixon was condemned, never mind any specific act.

And that's what it end up being as the condemnation was of course, he escaped impeachment.

I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.

What did we learn?

I don't think we learned very much.

We were right back at the same old stand.

Whether it's Mr.

Reagan, Iran-Contra, or whether it was a recent actions of George W Bush.

Look, it requires constant vigilance.

This thing does not carry itself.

It's for us, and it's for us to go ahead and keep it as it was intended.

One of the most important duties you have is to first, I think, understand the documents that gives you the rights that you claim you need, that you want, that you're entitled to, and understand why that is and how that comes about.

That's a great process.

I think I just, you know, I'm kind of old fashioned that way.

I'm just, you know, it works.

Why do you why you want to change it?

It works.

Yeah.

I'm sure their decision in there that that Supreme Court will interpret and in my view, misread in the Constitution, for example, with respect to Roe versus Wade, this whole privacy rights does not exist, in my view, in the Constitution.

That's the upside of it, is that you get to go back and forth and over time, those hot issues.

You know, Roe versus Wade from 73 will get worked out.

Here we are some 35 plus years later.

And people's attitudes and perceptions have changed and are changing.

That's a living debate that we can have.

I don't need to change the Constitution to prove the point one way or the other.

Jefferson was by nature a reformer, and he was a thinker.

And he was always asking, how can we do this better?

So Jefferson was certainly my inspiration, and I think he would be the inspiration for many others if they were to tackle constitutional reform.

Jefferson had no fear of change.

He had no fear of the future.

He welcomed it in many respects because he knew that society would be better in 100 years than the one he saw in his own time.

In the 1796, I think, it was that Jefferson became the vice president of the United States, having served as secretary of State under George Washington's administration.

And, his principal function, if you look at article one, section three, I believe the only prescribed duty for the vice president of the United States is presiding over the United States Senate.

In the course of that time, he wrote a parliamentary manual for the rules of the Senate, and to some extent, the House.

Those rules still persist today.

I think the Founding Fathers very wisely devised the Senate and let each state be equal in terms of two for each state.

You know, you've read the story, I'm sure of it.

And it's a factually true story of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson when he returned from France.

Jefferson, who was not part of the Constitutional Convention, queried Washington as to why they had a Senate.

What was the purpose of the Senate?

And Washington said, well, you've just answered the question.

He said, what do you mean?

He said, you took your hot coffee imported into the saucer.

The Senate is to soften, to cool down the rhetoric and the thinking and the intemperance and what we call respect with the other body, the House of Representatives.

People are fascinated by the operation of the United States Senate because really, it's an anti-democratic institution.

Small d Democratic.

Every state has two senators.

And even in the founders time, some states were much more highly populated than others.

The highest populated state was 13 times the size of the least populated state.

Today, the ratio is not 13 to 1.

It's 70 to 1.

California Fornia has 70 times the population of Wyoming.

If you put together all of the small states and you look at their populations with two senators per state.

It takes exactly 17% of the population of the United States to elect a majority of the United States Senate.

Is that healthy?

I mean, it's okay to ask.

The founders would have wanted us to ask.

They were concerned about the tyranny of the majority.

But if the tyranny of the majority is bad, isn't the opposite extreme also bad, which is the tyranny of the small minority?

In my view, 17% is a small minority.

A lot of what the federal government does is allocate tax money to the states.

It will come as no surprise to people that the small states get far more than they do, whether it's transportation money or education money or farm subsidies, whatever it may be.

What does that mean in practice?

It means that the people who live in the large states are subsidizing the small state.

Now, maybe that's a good thing.

Or maybe it isn't, but we ought to think about it.

We may not change them.

And under the current constitutional provision, it may well take a consensus of the states to change the Senate, which means it will never happen, because it would only take Wyoming to say no, we want to have two senators just like California.

There are ways to do it in a constitutional convention, but it would be a difficult process to pull that off.

But my point is, we ought to be thinking about these things.

The least that could happen is that people would finally understand the Senate and why it does what it does, and why it is so contrarian, and why it constantly stymies the interests of larger states and the heavy concentrations of American population.

I believe that one of the real weaknesses of our political system is that we can't fire a president in mid-term if we no longer have confidence in him or her, we can get rid of a criminal president through impeachment that we've not, in fact, been able to do that, except possibly in the case of Richard Nixon, who resigned.

If the commander in chief is incompetent, loses confidence in the country, we feel, well, we're just stuck with that person until the next election comes around.

In most political systems around the world, there's a procedure for vote of no confidence, which I think we need.

I would be much more concerned with changing the way we elect the president, because I think that's immediately dangerous.

What are you afraid of?

Hey Hey ho ho.

Al Gore has got to go.

Virtually all of your audience has lived through an example of the danger.

This is a systemic flaw.

Wasn't just a happenstance that in 2000, the president of the United States took office.

There was no pretense that we really wanted to know how the people of Florida had voted.

Counts over.

We're putting Bush in place.

Well, why were they even able to do that?

Because of the Electoral College system.

Because who carried Florida determined the election.

If we had a president elected by popular vote, this simply wouldn't happen.

And we would never have a president who took office, with, fewer votes than another candidate.

That's indefensible.

And, you know, this nearly happened the other way in 2004.

Kerry had carried Ohio, and that's just as wrong of the president should be elected by the people, and at a minimum, should be the candidate who gets more votes than everybody else.

But he certainly shouldn't be the number two finisher, you know.

Think about it for a minute.

How could that be?

The United States has the most difficult to amend Constitution in the entire world.

People might remember that it takes two thirds of each house of Congress in the quarters of the states.

This means that in order to win what I call the amendment game, you have to get 67 votes in the Senate, whatever two thirds of 435 is in the House, plus a minimum of 75 state legislative houses.

That's if you want to change the Constitution.

There have been 9000 amendments submitted to Congress.

Most of them should have been killed, but should virtually all of them have been killed without submitting to the states for ratification?

There were a lot of good ideas in there.

Maybe they were a relative handful compared to the bad ideas.

But Congress has been very stingy in submitting proposals and amendments to the states for ratification.

I went back and checked, from the time I entered the Senate in 1968, I left in 1996, and I think there were 35 or 40 attempts to amend the Constitution.

I supported DC statehood, which didn't make it.

It was only ratified by, I think, 16 of the required 38 states.

You can go down the list balanced budget amendment, voluntary prayer and school line item veto.

Abortion rights.

Some of those things I think should happen.

Others I just assumed they didn't happen.

One of the first pieces of legislation I worked on was the voting bill.

The amendment in 78, for the D.C.

residents to get the vote.

And it went through the you know, it was just fascinating to be that close to it and watch this process unfold.

The negotiations and the arguments and the threats and all that, just to get it out of the Congress.

and then you sending it to 50 state legislatures, all of whom have a very different perspective and understanding of the District of Columbia.

And it ain't happening.

The states are like, I don't think so.

And so you don't get your number but that's the process.

We tried to get an Equal Rights Amendment put into the Constitution, because if you take a close look at it.

Yeah, we were almost left out.

We did.

We get the 19th amendment to vote.

I worked on the equal rights ammendment when I was in Congress.

It had taken from the time from 1923 to 1972, for it to come to the Congress for discussion.

We haven't excluded people because of race.

We had an amendment that stopped that.

But let's stop excluding and discriminate against women because of gender.

And let's put it in the Constitution.

Had it passed, it would have been a great step forward for human rights and I think for relationship between men and women in this country.

But it failed.

I guess the procedure, at least for my knowledge, seems to be okay.

Everybody has a say.

Everybody has a chance to say yes or no.

The founders wanted to see some limitations on Congress.

So in article five, they provided us with a second means of amendment.

And really, for many of the founders, it was the preferred means of amendment.

It was to provide the states with direct access to changing the Constitution.

34 states under our current system of 50 states can request that the Congress call a constitutional convention.

Congress has no leeway.

It must call a constitutional convention.

And it really has no role in that constitutional convention.

That's up to the states.

So the constitutional Convention becomes the preeminent authority, not Congress.

You could never get an end to gerrymandering, the distortion of districts that favor the incumbents through Congress.

Of course they would never agree to that because it would threaten their reelections.

The only way we'll ever end gerrymandering really, is through a constitutional convention, when individual delegates representing the states can take over the process and submit amendments to the 50 states, asking 38 of them to ratify.

And the census of 2000 identified 4.1 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

You look at the Constitution, do you see 1.4% of our people represented?

There needs to be some mechanism that can ensure that through representative government, is representative of all the people within the government.

Objective redistricting would accomplish that.

I think it's time for another convention.

You know, the basics still remain sound, but I think we need to take another look.

One of the things I fear about having a constitutional convention in a time of crisis is that the momentary concerns understandable momentary concerns about national security, will pressure people, persuade them to make massive changes in the basic structure that would compromise individual rights and equality rights, and expand the power of the executive for the future, not just for this temporary passing crisis.

I have an innate fear of constitutional conventions because I've always thought that if we call a constitutional convention, let's say, to rewrite the Second Amendment, that the writers wouldn't stop there and they'd rewrite something that I think is absolutely perfect and change it to something that was horrible and bad, so flawed as it may be, I'm willing to have it stay as is, and until I can hear a convincing argument that will change only this bad thing, or only make this unclear thing more clear than it is now, and we won't do anything else.

If I can have that assurance.

I'd say go ahead.

People forget that a constitutional convention is not the final word.

The states are always the final word.

Every single word change of the Constitution coming out of a constitutional convention must be submitted to the 50 states, and 38 states must approve.

How many Democratic blue states are there?

There?

18.

How many Republican red states are there?

There are 24.

The other states being competitive in purple.

Well, if the Democratic states hang together as they would to defeat any conservative change, nothing will be ratified.

If the 24 Republican states stay together to defeat any liberal change, nothing from the left will be ratified.

So much of the fear that people have about a runaway convention is just insane.

It's absolutely untrue.

It's not justified by the facts.

It is our fear of the future, and it has become our fear of one another.

I'd much rather have somebody look me in the eye and say, you know, I think we have a terrific constitution.

I think the Electoral College is great.

I like the Senate and the unequal representation.

So everything you think is a weakness, I think is a strength.

I obviously disagree with that person, but I'd rather have somebody tell me that than say, you know.

I think you're probably right.

You really have identified a lot of weaknesses in our political structure.

But, you know, I just don't have enough faith in my fellow Americans that they're capable of being as temperate and rational as you and I are.

I think a constitutional convention is inevitable at some point when that point will be, no one can say.

It may be after a crisis, maybe a very unsuccessful foreign war or a terrible depression.

There may be something that triggers a reexamination of American society, but we hope the American republic goes on forever, for centuries and centuries.

And at some point the system, frankly, is going to deteriorate enough so that intelligent citizens will demand a new convention.

The President of United States believes that he has the power to go into the war with Iraq, on the basis of being the commander in chief of the armed forces.

Now, anybody that studied American history and American constitutional history knows that the ridiculous claim.

But does the public.

So when Congress doesn't push back and say, no, you don't, you just can't commit troops to this.

Is anybody telling the Congress push back?

This is a decision about war.

We maybe we should go to war.

Maybe that's okay.

But we should have a debate.

This is the most critical decision a president or a country can ever make.

Committing our young people to potential injury and to killing others as well.

You don't have to have a declaration of war The last declaration of war was World War Two.

And our troops have been engaged many times, depending on the intensity of the conflict.

And the Congress has never seen fit to the entire war since.

Why?

It's a question I can't answer.

I remember Ronald Reagan was telling me one time, there's that phone by your bed, and it rings at 4:00 in the morning.

And the voice, in a very calm way, is in the command center of the Department of Defense of the White House in the various areas and saying, no, Mr.

President, this is the situation.

There's so many Americans about to be taken hostage.

Our military is poised to take actions to do the rescue.

But I must tell you, Mr.

President, to do this, rescue will have to involve the violation of the sovereign rights of nations over-flight, or whatever the case may be.

What's the decision, Mr.

President?

He's got to make that decision.

There's no time for the president to sit down and assemble a whole group of people.

It's pretty clear to me that the two terms of George Bush have been an assault on the Constitution.

We see it in the treatment of prisoners.

We see it in the rules about wiretapping.

We see it in a just narrowing of the freedoms we all enjoy.

And unless we correct these or beat them back, we're going to live in a different America than we thought we were living in.

And it's surprising to me how few people are alarmed about this, because I don't care if you're a Republican, a Democrat, a conservative, a liberal, or don't care at all about these things, this affects you and you need to be on the alert about it.

And you need to say, stop.

I want a constitution that speaks to everybody.

I want a Constitution that protects freedom for everybody.

I want a Constitution that protects my right to ask questions.

I think people aren't alarmed for a variety of reasons.

First, the specter of terrorism is terrified many of us.

I mean, the 9/11 was such a devastating blow to not only our persons, but to our psyche that we could be attacked in this way.

And it made some of us say, well, I'll do anything to make sure something like that never happens again.

And if allowing the government to listen in on my telephone calls as a way to stop that from happening, then that's okay.

But that's not okay.

I don't want the government listening on my telephone calls unless they have some probable cause to do so, unless I'm about to commit some crime and they know about it.

No, don't listen to my telephone calls.

These are my telephone calls.

These are my words I speak.

And you have no right to limit any of that ever.

Mr.

president, you're either right or you're wrong.

Where is the problem here?

I don't get it.

Where is the problem?

All these people are so upset about his interpretation.

Then sue him.

They say.

You know what?

It's the cause of action that says you're wrong.

And I have standing because I'm a U.S.

citizen and run it through the process.

You don't get to skip over the Supreme Court and make an independent assessment of the president's judgment and interpretation of the Constitution, legally.

You can do it vocally, you can protest it.

You can do all of that because the Constitution let's do that.

But to change the process, to change the interpretation, you've got to bring that cause before the court, and the court will weigh it against the Constitution and will either side with you or against you, or just kick it back and say you don't have standing in the first place.

The notion of the Bill of rights is the great protector of the American individual rights is a modern idea, not part of our constitutional history.

Just to make this point, because I just love it.

In 1798, we passed the Sedition Act, the Sedition Act, which John Adams signed in his biographer David McCollum, called it the worst act of his entire presidency, made it a crime to criticize the government and the president a crime, and they prosecuted people.

Where was the court with the First Amendment?

They were saying, well, we don't have any role in that to show you how political this was.

It was not a crime to criticize the vice president.

And why not?

Thomas Jefferson was the vice president, and they wanted to criticize him like crazy.

They couldn't wait to keep criticizing him.

So you could criticize Jefferson in the, you know, in his, Republican Democratic Party, but you couldn't criticize the Federalist Party, and it was a crime.

So the Bill of rights is a late comer in its enforcement.

It's the 1950s.

Sometimes over the course of history, in a particular period with two steps forward and one step back, sometimes it's two steps backwards and one step forward.

We are right now in one of the recurring periods when we are in a national security crisis, when people are understandably concerned about whether the safety of the nation is jeopardized.

And at every single such period we see government reacting the same way.

The executive branch overreacts, unnecessarily expands its own power, reduces the rights of individuals, including freedom of speech.

And then there's a corrective mechanism that sets in and by the way, this is not a partisan issue.

It's really an issue among the branches of government.

I mean, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a human rights hero in many respects, and yet he was responsible for the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

So I think we have to expect from history.

So no matter what the president's values might be in another context, when the security of the nation seems to be in danger, we can expect the executive branch to extend its power to the maximum.

And that makes it more important for the checks and balances to come into play for Congress to exercise a vigorous oversight role, for the courts to vigorously exercise judicial review for public groups such as the ACLU and others, to act as watchdogs for the press, to act as a watchdog.

But if you look at the course of history, you have every basis for optimism that a correction will come into play.

Ours is a simple, fundamental document.

And as John Marshall once put it, in a case, it's meant to survive the crises of generations, to survive over time.

Now, to do that requires interpretation.

Many of the Constitution's most important phrases are really quite general due process of law.

Equal protection of the law.

Cruel.

Unusual punishment.

These are not self-explanatory words.

They.

They require someone to interpret them and give them meaning.

And I think in a very real sense, the Constitution was meant to be not a static document, not for one moment in time, but meant to be an organic document, rather like the English common law.

I think the framers were influenced by the sense of law is something which develops and takes on meaning from one generation to another.

Madison and Jefferson, in their correspondence, were very fond of the phrase the earth belongs always to the living generation.

And if one takes that seriously, and certainly they did then it would mean that the Constitution ought not to be seen to be the ark of the covenant, somehow to be worshiped, and never to be changed.

But that, as it shouldn't be, just easily changed.

It is fundamental law.

It's not an ordinary statute.

It is not in the code.

And therefore it shouldn't just be subject to alteration by the legislative majorities, but where it changes, clearly indicated that it ought to come about.

One of the most significant declines in the nation over the last 30 years has been Americans understanding of their constitution.

It's remarkable how little anybody knows about it.

Both Ronald Reagan and Derek Bok, the president of Harvard within a 5 or 6 year period, said that we are losing our relationship to the Constitution.

The Constitution guarantees freedom.

And some people interpret that freedom as to do nothing and pay no attention to anything.

So that's one end of the spectrum.

But I hope that young people are guided and drawn to this magnificent document.

Understanding the Constitution and understanding the concept of rule of law in general is central to understanding who we are as a nation.

We look to the law to solve eventually our problems.

It doesn't mean our issues.

It doesn't mean that we may agree with the solutions.

But we do agree, as Americans that the Constitution provides a framework for solving those issues.

I think it is so important to have our nation's young citizens and future voters and candidates and Supreme Court justices learn about the Constitution very early, and I love the idea of presenting it to them as a work in progress, which it is, even if it is not subject to a complete overhaul all through the constitutional convention process.

It's always subject to the amendment process.

It's always subject to the interpretation process.

It's always subject to implementation and enforcement or to non-implementation and non enforcement.

I'm James Madison said at the beginning that it's only worth the paper that it's written on, unless there are actual people who understand what their constitutional rights are and are willing to stand up and demand that government officials respect their rights, and the Constitution is not self executing.

You know, Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia carries a copy round in his pocket.

And I think that's good advice to everybody.

Carry a copy around in your pocket and look at it every now and then and see what it says.

And remind yourself of how precious it is.

Major funding for questioning the constitution was provided by Paul and Victoria Saunders and by J. Thornton Kirby.

Questioning the Constitution was produced in collaboration with the University of Virginia's Center for politics.