Commonwealth Club: Erwin Chemerinsky: No Democracy Lasts Forever

Has the U.S. Constitution become a threat to American democracy? The dean of the UC Berkeley law school came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old founding document is responsible for the crisis now facing American democracy. He points out that just 15 of the 11,848 amendments proposed since 1789 have passed, and he contends that the very nature of our polarization results from the Constitution’s “bad bones,” which have created a government that no longer works or has the confidence of the public. Yet he says political Armageddon can still be avoided if a new constitutional convention is empowered to replace the Constitution of 1787, much as the Founding Fathers replaced the outdated Articles of Confederation.