Jill Lepore Ends 60 Minutes With Amendment Argument
60 minutes ended its Sunday night episode with Jill Lepore arguing that the federal Constitution can still be amended. Anderson Cooper introduced the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer in The Last Minute, then let the segment turn into a blunt case for constitutional change.
Cooper and Lepore
Lepore said the American legal system is founded on “the idea that we can always make things better,” but she added, “But I worry that at this point, we’ve all but forgotten that the federal Constitution can be amended, too.” Her point was not abstract. She said state constitutions are regularly amended through referendums on election day, while the federal document has not been amended “in any meaningful way” since the 26th Amendment in 1971.
The 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Lepore used that benchmark to show how rare federal change has become, even though the Constitution has been revised before and can be revised again. That is the practical takeaway for viewers: the amendment process is not dead, but it has become easy to overlook while debate keeps moving to courts instead of legislatures.
1776 and the Supreme Court
Lepore said written constitutions were invented 250 years ago, pointing to state constitutions created in New Hampshire, Virginia, and Pennsylvania in 1776. She argued that the United States is now at an “excellent time to ask that question,” especially because the 250th anniversary of those first constitutions is approaching and because she says the U.S. Constitution is being amended all the time by the Supreme Court.
Her criticism is sharper in light of her 2025 book, We the People, where she argued that the Constitution is a living document designed to be amended by each generation. She has also argued that constitutional originalism has gained force at the Supreme Court through Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, with Thomas the only one of those avowed originalists not appointed by Donald Trump in his first term.
Dred Scott to Roe v. Wade
The historical stakes in Lepore’s argument run through some of the Court’s most consequential rulings. She pointed to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that rights afforded to U.S. citizens by the Constitution did not extend to people of African descent and said Congress could not abolish slavery. Eight years later, after the Civil War, the 13th Amendment formally ended slavery.
She also tied the argument to Roe v. Wade, in which the Supreme Court said the 14th Amendment included a right to privacy that encompassed abortion access, before the Court overturned Roe in 2022. That sequence leaves Cooper’s closing segment with a clear business-like reality for civic life: the Constitution is not just interpreted on television and in courtrooms, it is still being rewritten through power, and the public keeps deciding whether that rewrite happens by amendment or by judges.
Sunday night programming
Lepore’s segment came at the tail end of an episode that also examined white supremacist groups and conspiracists who offer help to communities hit by natural disasters to launder their reputations and recruit new followers. Ending on constitutional amendments gave the hour a sharper final note than the surrounding material, and it pushed the broadcast from topical reporting into a direct argument about how American democracy changes.
