The Person Who Changes the Constitution

Earlier this week, Virginia’s legislature voted to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), clearing the 38-state threshold to place the amendment in the U. S. Constitution. That may not happen, however: Virginia’s ratification comes 37 years after Congress’s ratification deadline, and the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel recently issued an opinion that the amendment is no longer valid. Yet the department’s memo does not bind the United States archivist—only a vote by Congress can likely do that. So who will decide?

There is one person whose job it is to certify new amendments to the Constitution—the keeper of the Constitution, if you will—and that person is the United States archivist, the civil servant and career librarian whose day job is to oversee the National Archives and Records Administration. This is no small task: As James Madison explained, ratification of a constitutional provision is irreversible, made “in toto and forever.” (Though,