70 Am. U. L. Rev. 773 (2021).

*  William Stamps Farish Professor in Law, Professor of Government, and Director of Constitutional Studies, The University of Texas at Austin. Email: richard.albert@law.utexas.edu. I thank the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, for the opportunity to share the ideas in an earlier version of this Article as the 2020 Constitution Day Lecture. I am grateful to the Constitutional Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools for selecting an earlier draft of this Article in a competitive Call for Papers for presentation at its Annual Meeting. My thanks to workshop participants at Boston College, Brooklyn Law School, Florida International University, the University of Kansas, Southern Methodist University, and Washington and Lee University for engaging with the ideas on an earlier draft of this Article. My thanks also to the William Stamps Farish Professorship and the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy for generously supporting my research. And finally, I express my immense gratitude to the entire team at the American University Law Review for excellent editorial assistance on this Article.

The celebrated United States Constitution does not derive its legitimacy from morality. Its legitimacy is rooted in an amoral code structured around the peculiar value of outcome-neutrality. By design, the Constitution does not evaluate whether a lawful choice is morally right or wrong; it evaluates only whether the choice satisfies the procedures the Constitution requires for it to have been made. What matters, then, is not the content of the choice. It is the very act of choosing. These fiercely democratic foundations serve as both the font of the Constitution’s popular legitimacy and more ominously the greatest threat to the liberal democratic principles that define the Constitution in its common perception at home and abroad. In this Article, I show that the amorality of the Constitution permeates every part of the country’s constitutional amendment apparatus. I draw from text, theory, and history to reveal an important if shocking truth about the Constitution: no principle is inviolable, no right is absolute, and no rule is unamendable.