Six Amendments (Book Review)

I just read an interesting new book by retired Supreme Court Justice Stephens.  I may have mentioned elsewhere that the Supreme Court is interesting to me because no other nation has anything that equals it, and while it is maddening idiotic at time (read Dred Scott or Citizens United for examples), they also over time have been the steadying hand since we are working with what was supposed to be a "temporary" Constitution that is definitely showing major fissures in trying to deal with the real flat world. 

Here is my review from Goodreads:

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by John Paul Stevens
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Excellent book and well-written. You should know something about Constitutional law and the Supreme Court (NOT what you read or see in the media which is nearly all wrong) in order to enjoy this book fully.

Justice Stevens' recommendations for amendments are not extremely radical, rather they mostly patch up some gaping holes or some colossally misguided Supreme Court decisions.

In either case the Founding Fathers would be aghast at the fact that more has not been done to fix their little "temporary starter" constitution - most of them expected it to last for a couple of decades at most and then be replaced by a more substantive and encompassing document based on experience to that point. Instead, the US has taken the band-aid approach -- using a crazy quilt of Supreme Court decisions and popular-at-the-time Congressional patches to hammer it into something that is at times unrecognizable in practice.

Justice Stevens recognizes the flaws, and makes some credible and interesting proposals to fix them.

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