Amending Power

Abstract

AbstractChapter 7, ‘Amending Power: Vertical Reciprocity and Political Liberalism’ offers a political-liberal account of the nature, source, and limits of amending power—an account consistent with, purportedly ameliorative of, but not explicitly present in Political Liberalism. After introducing the concept of amending power and its twofold partaking of both constituted (insofar as it is exercised by officials and by the electorate) and constituent (insofar as it can amend the constitutive rules of the polity) power, its exercise is elucidated in relation to the questions: when is amending needed or to be avoided? what can be amended? who is to amend what? in which institutional venues is amending to occur? The second part of the chapter addresses the limits of amending power, by first identifying aspects of the constitution that are to be considered implicitly unamendable (independently of their being so qualified in specific constitutional provisions) and then reviewing different justifications that have been offered in support of their implicit unamendability. In this case, as anticipated, a new justification, premised on the notion of vertical reciprocity among free and equal generations of the same people, is introduced as an ameliorative addition to Rawls’s own explicit argument for the implicit entrenchment of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. In closing, a ‘liberal principle of amending power’ is propounded and claimed to round out the reconstruction of the constitutional theory implicitly embedded in Political Liberalism.