"Recently a White House commission heard testimony on a controversial proposal to strip the U.S. Supreme Court of its power to rule on the constitutionality of American laws. The court has grown too powerful and undemocratic, several witnesses said.

A few weeks later, a legal scholar wrote that it was time to lengthen the ludicrously short two-year terms that members of the House of Representatives serve under the Constitution. Little can get done, he wrote, in an atmosphere of perpetual campaigning.

Around the country, there are conversations underway about how the U.S. Senate could be restructured so that it doesn’t allot the same number of senators — two — to a state like Wyoming, which has fewer than 600,000 people, as it does to California, which has nearly 40 million people. The current system leaves millions of Americans grossly underrepresented.

There’s also talk of doing away with the electoral college, of banning corporate money from politics, of breaking up the biggest states (Los Angeles County could become the country’s eighth-largest state!), of depoliticizing redistricting and of allowing noncitizens to vote.

Many of the proposals are old ones, long backed by frustrated academics and head-in-the-clouds idealists, but in my circles at least, I hear a new sense of urgency for radical, structural change in the government.

Is it any surprise?

The country is in the grips of crisis, stuck, incapable of moving forward. Presidents can’t fulfill their agendas. Congress can’t agree on legislation. The Supreme Court is deeply politicized. We’re still reeling from four years under President Trump, who trampled on democracy and its rules. Bipartisanship is passé.

Problems as serious as the climate crisis, economic inequality and racial injustice, and problems as simple and uncontroversial as rebuilding crumbling infrastructure and covering our national debts, seem insuperable in the face of partisanship and enmity.

It’s no wonder Americans are eager to reinvent or reinvigorate democracy.

I’d like to tell you that change is coming. Many of the proposals, after all, would improve our lot. The electoral college is an anachronism — of course the presidency should go to the candidate who wins the most votes. The structure of the Senate is a glaring violation of the principle of one-person, one-vote; the result of a deal from 1787 that badly needs reassessment.

But ironically, at a time when people are willing to consider big changes, big changes may be more distant than ever."

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-10-07/government-change-constitution-amendment