Should the U.S. Constitution be amended?

The U.S. Constitution is used in many of America's greatest debates — the fairness of the Electoral College, how to handle the national budget and what constitutes legal campaign spending. But does the key to solving these problems lie in amending the Constitution?

Experts take on that question in this Intelligence Squared debate with the motion: Call a Convention to amend the Constitution.

For the motion: Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Harvard, and Mark Meckler, President of Citizens for Self-Governance.

Against the motion: Georgetown Law professor David Super, and Walter Olson, Cato's Senior Fellow of Constitutional Studies.

Opening statements

For: Debating policy versus policy misses the point of what's going on in America today, Mark Meckler said, opening the debate.

"There is indeed a single fundamental question facing us as Americans today, and it is not what should we do," Meckler said. "The question facing us and facing our fellow countrymen is a two-word question, very simply, who decides."

America's founders already had the answer to this question, "We the People," Meckler said, he says throughout history power has been shifting from U.S. citizens and state governments to Washington D.C.

Meckler argued it's not enough to just elect new officials, saying historically that has not resulted in change. Meckler instead suggests America needs to return to it's "self-governing" heritage.

"I ask you to stand in the shoes of our forefathers, to be brave, to act boldly, and to call an Article V convention to amend the Constitution," Meckler concluded.

Against: "Could the U.S. Constitution be improved? Of course, it could," said Walter Olson in his opening statement.

Olson agreed that returning power to the states isn't entirely a bad idea.

"I therefore am not talking about the fact that I would necessarily dislike the actual amendments proposed," Olson said, "nor am I saying that I would necessarily find that bad people, worse than our current elected representatives, would get into the positions of being the delegates to such a convention."

However, Olson said such a move would be "dangerous and uncharted," pointing to the fact that the process of states calling a convention has not been used in 225 years. "We don't know how this would work. We do know that the relevant language in Article V is very terse and very uninformative."

There is very little language specifying the worth of each state's vote or how the process for passing legislature would work, which would certainly cause more conflict, he said.

"So, what we are setting ourselves up for here is uncertainty, which will be resolved by two different institutions: the Congress and the Supreme Court," Olson said. "And ironically, these are exactly the same two institutions that this whole process is intended to work around."

Olson argues that attempting to amend the Constitution would only serve to further divide the country and attempting to come up with new policies that could stand the scrutiny of 50 state legislatures would be a "waste of effort."

To listen to the whole debate, click the audio player above.

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