Two Constitutions, Two Very Different Bets on the American People

This Constitution Day, it’s worth sitting with a simple contrast. The U.S. Constitution runs about 7,500 words and has been amended just 27 times in 236 years. It was written to do one job well: establish a durable structure of limited government and enumerated rights, then get out of the way — trusting future generations of Americans to govern themselves through ordinary lawmaking, elections, and accountability at the ballot box.

Louisiana’s constitution tells a very different story. Our 1974 charter — the state’s 11th — has already been amended more than 200 times and has more than doubled in length since ratification. That’s not an accident of history. It reflects a habit of governing by constitutional amendment rather than trusting the ordinary legislative process. When lawmakers or interest groups don’t trust a future legislature to make a decision correctly, Louisiana’s instinct has too often been to lock today’s preferred outcome into the constitution itself, placing it permanently out of reach of tomorrow’s voters and their elected representatives.

The irony is that this makes Louisiana’s government less accountable, not more. A bad statute can be fixed by the next legislative session. A bad constitutional provision requires a statewide vote — and in Louisiana, we’ve shown an unusual willingness to keep asking for exactly that, over and over again, rather than fixing the underlying problem: a constitution that tries to do statute’s job.

The federal framers made a bet on the American people: give them a stable structure, and trust them to handle the rest. Louisiana’s constitution has, in too many places, stopped making that same bet. As we mark Constitution Day, that’s the deeper reform worth returning to — not another one-off amendment, but a genuine, principled rewrite that lets our constitution go back to setting the rules of the game, rather than picking the winners.