Legal Commentary

It's been 37 years since the last contemporaneously proposed and ratified constitutional amendment (I'm setting the aside the 27th Amendment, with it's tortured 200-year history).  There have been only two comparably long periods in our history without an amendment, the 61-year period between the 12th and the 13th Amendments, and the 43-year period between the 15th and the 16th Amendment.   It strikes me as most unlikely that we will have another amendment by 2014, so in six years we will be in the second-longest period in our history without an amendment.

Constitutional amendments are notoriously hard to adopt.  Even the important work of the Continuity of Government Commission, which developed bipartisan approaches to the compelling problem of government continuity in the wake of a massive terrorist attack, went nowhere.  Is it possible that there will be no more constitutional amendments?  We certainly need them.  Fixing our idiotic system of electing the President would be a good start, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

So here's a question for our PrawfsBlawg readers:  What do you think will be the next constitutional amendment?  I'll check in in fifty years, and see if anyone got it right.  Drinks on me for the winner.