Though the vast majority of proposed Constitutional amendments have never been ratified, law professor Roger C. Hartley argues that proposed amendments have powerfully shaped many contentious issues in American history. Proposed Constitutional changes played a role in American politics, from the Bill of Rights and the Alien and Sedition Acts to battles over gender, race, abortion, free speech, the federal budget, and international relations in our time.

The Constitution’s Article V amendment process seems like a relic that has played little part in the massive changes in the rules of government since 1789. Only seventeen Constitutional amendments have been adopted since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, although about 12,000 amendment proposals have been formally introduced in Congress. States have filed hundreds more petitions requesting a constitutional convention. Despite this record of near futility, today’s conservatives and liberals eagerly are pushing for new amendments to the Constitution. Why?

Hartley contends that a mere scorecard of ratified amendments conceals the sometimes extensive political impact of proposals to amend the Constitution. First, campaigns for amendments can mobilize effective support that can bring about massive changes even if amendments fail. The Equal Rights Amendment galvanized an activist movement that expanded gender rights in the U.S. Like other failed amendments, the ERA helped women and others focus dissent from existing rules, expand democratic deliberation, and foster institutions to battle for an expansion of rights. Looking back to 1937, Hartley shows that a proposed amendment affected individual justices after the Supreme Court struck down key New Deal legislation. Days after President Roosevelt floated the notorious “court packing” plan, two Senators proposed a Constitutional amendment enabling Congress to override any Supreme Court ruling striking down a law as unconstitutional. This proposed amendment influenced some justices to reconsider recent rulings and subsequently to uphold the constitutionality of New Deal legislation.

Second, proposed Constitutional amendments have pressured Congress directly. Hartley shows that such proposals affected the politics of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Embargo Act of 1807, the nullification crisis, the direct election of Senators, and 1980s budgetary rules. Third, proposed Constitutional amendments also have prompted restrictions on executive power. After World War II, as the United Nations pressed for international agreements to protect human rights, Republican Senator John Bricker proposed amendments that would block executive agreements to implement human rights agreements within the United States—changes that could threaten segregation in the South, for example. The Bricker amendments failed, but they pushed the Eisenhower administration to promise to abide by the proposed restrictions, producing “a stunning victory insulating US domestic laws from the prescriptions and proscriptions of international human rights treaties” (p. 147).

In short, Constitutional amendments can have significant impact even if they fall short of the almost impossible majorities required to add them to the Constitution. Like presidential veto threats, amendments need only be brandished, and not necessarily deployed, to gain political advantage. Hartley’s cases show that advocates of political change propose Constitutional amendments deliberately and regularly to help leverage political victories. Amendment proposals can move veto players, forge coalitions, and inspire social movements. Proposed amendments can aim to divide the opposition (as in Representative John Quincy Adams’s proposals to eviscerate slavery). They can express dissent with the status quo and force elites to deliberate antiquated practices. They can prod political institutions into action or retreat. They can signal public opinion to these institutions. Even if the amendment proposals do not change policy outcomes, they can advantage individual politicians who can use them to posture without much fear that the amendments will actually be ratified. Hartley’s realistic approach exposes a good deal of the political grandstanding, manipulation, and gaming that lies just beneath the surface of the noble claims made for embedding policy in the Constitution.

Hartley’s argument is strongest where it produces clear evidence that amendment proposals actually made a difference in political behavior, as in Supreme Court decisions. For example, most of the substance of the ERA has been incorporated into the working rules of American law. Hartley’s other cases are plausible, but they are less persuasive when they depend on claims that that political actions are “widely viewed” as an effort to head off the success of a constitutional amendment (p. 114).

Article V clearly is not a sufficient explanation of the cases covered in the book, but some readers will wonder whether proposed amendments were necessary for explaining any of the cases. What might have happened in the absence of amendment proposals? Would things have turned out the same way? Would the anti-slavery movement or the women’s movement have failed without a proposed amendment to serve as a movement motivator or a tool for dividing the opposition? Shrewdly framed Congressional proposals (the Wilmot Proviso) or clumsy court decisions (Dred Scott) can do the same. Would the women’s movement—a powerful river with many tributaries—have been so much weaker without the ERA? Would the results have differed significantly? The ERA battle clearly stimulated enough opposition to stymie ratification—but that opposition, organized at the state and national level—was also sufficient to stymie other actions that required less significant majoritarian hurdles. The brief vignette about Prohibition does not show convincingly that the Constitutional amendment was necessary for national regulation of alcohol—and of course, it was not sufficient to effectively proscribe alcohol in places that did not support it anyway.

Looked at another way, if one were to choose a weapon for political change, when would they turn first to proposing a Constitutional amendment? How valuable are constitutional amendments for achieving political goals, and under what circumstances? Hartley shows that a proposed Constitutional amendment may do more harm than good for a cause. In fact, introducing a constitutional amendment backfired in the case of the income tax, Philippine independence, and right-to work amendments. It is perhaps telling that the book does not discuss the poignant battle to ban child labor in the Progressive Era, a battle that began with Congressional legislation and died as a proposed Constitutional amendment.

Hartley enriches our imagination about Article V, and provides enough evidence to support more investigation of his claim that amendment proposals play an underappreciated role in American politics. These insights, garnered from the sweep of American political history, are enough to generate valuable hypotheses and counterfactuals. Proposed Constitutional amendments may be an important, underappreciated symptom of American political change, one that merits more study. The book leaves us with more good questions than answers—and along with its other qualities, that makes it a constructive contribution.