"Could One Phone Call Lead to the 28th Amendment?"

The new episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — audio and transcript here (at Podscribe).

This was annoying to listen to for so many reasons, but I will leave it to you to discover most of them. I'll just pick out one glaring problem: The abortion right that was found in Roe and rejected in Dobbs was never based on equality. It was based on substantive due process, sometimes phrased as privacy, found in the Due Process Clause. If the ERA could be a source of a new right to abortion, the Equal Protection Clause is already there to serve the same purpose. One of the reasons the ERA failed back in the 1970s was because many people believed that all the equality rights women needed could be found in the Equal Protection Clause. What good was a new text to puzzle over? 

Righties and lefties get together at Harvard Law School to make common cause over the notion of a constitutional convention.

Boston Herald reports:

Speakers representing a broad swath of American political thought are coming from the Green Party, the Cato Institute, Progressive Democrats of America and the American Freedom Agenda, among others.

Agenda items will include term limits, expanding state rights and limiting private money in politics.

Attendees aren’t likely to agree on many of those issues, said keynote speaker Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and founder of the influential conservative libertarian blog Instapundit. But, he said, “There is a widespread sense that things aren’t right and we should talk about fundamental changes instead of incremental changes — sort of like a reboot.”

That makes me want to dig out my favorite quote from Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France":

In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.

Plus I'm having a flashback to 1980...