> you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway. And that's my point. We can think of government as a complex machine controlled by

> you’re nowhere close to the mandate for amending the constitution anyway. And that's my point. We can think of government as a complex machine controlled by software that's designed to limit what the machine's operators can do: • The prerequisites for updating the software are onerous. • The updating process is jealously "guarded" by any number of special interests who wield outsized influence and, by and large, prefer things the way they are, thank you. So as a practical matter, it's essentially impossible to update the machine's software — even when updates would be useful to accommodate changes in circumstances. No competent engineer would regard that as acceptable. (It's a bit reminiscent of the liberum veto in the Sejm [parliament] of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [0], albeit not quite as bad.) Small wonder that lawyers have responded by hacking the system, using, e.g., the 14th Amendment and the All-Writs Act. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto