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The framers of the Constitution took care to allow their document to evolve along with our society by providing for the creation of amendments to add to it, or modify it, when we felt it necessary. Yet it can be seen that over the past 50 years there have been no new amendments of real import (the last such one, the 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, dealt with suffrage for 18-year-olds). Why should this be so?

It’s not as if there aren’t enough pressing national concerns. Think of the Equal Rights Amendment. How about the issue of whether our president should be elected by popular vote? Shouldn’t there be a cap put on campaign contributions? How about a ban on partisan gerrymandering? Or restoring the original 1965 Voting Rights Act?

Any one of these, and more, would seem to have sufficient popular support to warrant a possible constitutional amendment.

The fundamental problem is that we no longer live in just one America. We have been becoming two Americas — Blue America and Red America. In order to get a constitutional amendment ratified, it takes, first, a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress (to get it proposed), followed by the approval of three-fourths of our states (which is 38) — a very tall order in view of our increasingly polarized politics.

So our Constitution seems to be, in effect, frozen in time. We now must helplessly depend upon the wisdom of nine unelected justices to decide matters of even the greatest moment because we no longer seem to be able to agree among ourselves.

Stan Pearson, Newport News