And media. In 1787, 55 delegates met in philadelphia and drafted the constitution. These four pages of parchment laid the foundation for this new government. Much of what we know as the constitution was written later through 27, ratified them, amend means to broaden the scope of our democracy. Tonights speakers will help us understand the history and the development of our National Charter. This evenings event would not be possible without the continued generous support of our donors. Hauenstein Center Memberships are a vital part in our ability to continue fulfilling colonel Ralph W Hauenstein vision of raising a community of ethical, effective leaders for the 21st century. We accomplish this Important Mission through through programing like this evening and work and the work being completed in the peter c cooke Leadership Academy. To learn more about membership or to renew your membership, speak to a Hauenstein Center staff member. Tonight we will hear from one of our peter c cooke Leadership Academy fellow candidates. Then jeff poulet, director of the ford leadership forum, will introduce tonights speakers. Our speakers will provide a brief introduction of their work, and then i will join them for a moderated conversation, followed by a question and answer session from the audience. Hauenstein center staff will be in the aisles with handheld microphones for the questions. Our Common Ground program manager, kahler sweeney, will wrap up the evening with closing remarks. I now get to share one of the best parts of my job. I get the privilege to introduce you to one of our peter c cook Leadership Academy fellow candidates who will share his leadership minute. Graham sarhan junior is a senior studying mechanical engineering. He was born and raised in london and is highly motivated to outwork his competition. Aziz believes he is defined by his work ethic and ability to create bonds with different people. He is often hard on himself, hoping that if he can be perfect, at least he can be excellent. Aziz believes before you can attain the level you want that you aspire to reach. You have to be willing to grind and sacrifice who you are to become who you want to be. He would like to make as many defining moments as possible on his journey. Please join me and welcoming aziz. Aziz. Good evening. My name is aziz graham, sergeant junior, and im happy to see quick Leadership Academy kennedy and middle eastern. Im african. Im extroverted. Im loud. And i would like to get something off my chest. I believe that only those who are born to be leaders should be leaders. I find that line somewhat somewhat ironic because has anybody in this room met somebody . Theres only one leader. I would like to transition into what i like to call the metamorphosis of what its been like on my leadership journey. I was approached by a friend who was at the time the president of the National Society of black engineers, who saw in me at, lets say, 2017 as somebody that would be a good Vice President. I declined abruptly because at the time i was teetering on the edge of academic probation. And on the verge of being sent back across the pond. I had in no way what it took to be a leader. I didnt have the shoulders to bear other peoples problems because i was barely able to deal with my own. However, i did what no want to represent what our great work ethic could overcome. So i repeat, at no point did i want to be a leader. However, because of this work ethic and because of this dream, i compromised with the president and we came up with the idea that i would be the Vice President until somebody better came along. But what i found as time passed on that through that passion, i found other people that shared similar dreams start to attach themselves to me. I found that they wanted to be utilized to find this common goal and essentially manifest what i considered at the point a dream and i agreed that, you know, as time passes by, you know, everybody will get to that point where they found like, okay, im getting closer to a dream, but i want everybody to think about the the fact that most of your journeys, including my own, some of a lot of parallels between the purpose of todays evening, which is the constitution, the constitution was not a one and done. It was something where a lot of amendments were made. In other words, with all the efforts that the Founding Fathers had made, they still faced repercussions and the bitterness of failure. The defining moment in leadership is not what happens when failure happens. Its what you do after him. And i want everybody to think about the paradox, which is success. Failure is the absence of success. But success is not the absence of failure. Which leads me to my final points. Leadership is authentic. Being you, allowing others to follow you, which means whenever you are shining and would ever greatness that you consider you. Theres somebody watching. Whenever you have a conversation with another person, i like to think of that as a trade in leadership. Youre learning from somebody as much as theyre learning from you. So when you are being that greatness, that is you, when youre questioning whether youre a leader, youre always leading. So lead with it from within. My names aziz Graham Sarhan junior. And im a leader. By. Oh, good evening, everyone. Jeff plot. I am the director of the ford leadership forum, part of the gerald r. Ford president ial foundation, and i am pleased as punch to be here tonight and partner of the Hauenstein Center and have the opportunity to introduce our two speakers. I would like to draw your attention to the your program, which has a lot of the biographical information about the speakers. I wont be repeating that. What i do want to talk about is for a few minutes as i introduce them, is what were talking about tonight. And thats this book which i had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with last night and as i was telling the speakers earlier, its rather remarkable. I dont recall. And other book that takes a systematic look at the amendment process of our constitution. We are now 235 years into our constitutional history and its an interesting history in part because i think the length of time sometimes blinds us to some of the novelty of the whole thing. In fact, madison uses that phrase to describe the constitution in the federalist. Papers, or the novelty of the experiment. Part of the novelty of the thing is that its a written constitution. It is, to my knowledge, the first written constitution that a nation had to establish its government and bind itself together. And i often find myself wondering what the framers of the constitution would think if they came back to America Today to see what they have wrought and sort certainly they would be surprised by the size, the scope, the centralization of our government. They would probably be surprised by the weakness of congress, which they thought was going to be the most Dangerous Branch of government in many ways, they would probably be surprised that the things still exists at all. Im not sure that the i mean, there was a lot of pessimism at the writing of the constitution about whether this thing could do endure across generations. And one of the reasons the authors of this book did, john crowl and Wilfred Codrington do so brilliantly in this book is they show how built into the constitution, the people who wrote the constitution dealt with some really fundamental problems. Among these are the questions of how we separate what a constitution is and what a constitution means. A lot of times when we think about constitution issues, were obsessed with meaning, but theyre indicating in this book that the constitution is about more than just meaning. They understand that, as edmund burke says, a government that has no capacity to change. Neither has any means to preserve itself. And so built in to our constitutional system is a way of preserving the system by changing the system. They dealt with a fundamental problem of political life, and that is how can you create dynamic change within a political system while at the same time trying to figure out how to stable wise it and keep it from spinning in a kind of vertiginous, dizzying fashion and also how you can have a government that can adapt itself to changing circumstances without itself necessarily being the agent of those changing circumstances. And all these are the sort of difficult parties that they faced in the creation of our constitution. And one powerful means they established to help deal with these problems was to create the amendment process. And as a political scientist, i can tell you that it is a part of constitutional design and constitutional history that just has not gotten sufficient attention. So when the Hauenstein Center approached us and suggested this and i did a little bit of looking, read a couple articles by our authors, i thought, this is really interesting, and why has no one done this before . And its in part a testimony to just how interesting the book is that its kind of hard to believe that no ones done it before. I can tell you, based upon reading the book, you can tell from the biographies that our speakers, john cole and Wilfred Codrington, are experts in their field. But more importantly, their expertise is revealed in the text of this book itself, and im confident will be revealed in the deft way theyll be handling your questions tonight. So please join me in welcoming tonights speakers Wilfred Codrington and john kowal. Thanks so. Well, wilfred, john, again, thank you for joining us tonight to help us celebrate constitution day. Thank you, brendan. Thank thank you, everyone. We were so delighted to be here and we want to just begin by thanking grande about Grande ValleyState University and the Hauenstein Center and the gerald r. Ford president ial foundation. Jeff, i want to thank you for your kind words. It meant a lot to us. And and i want to thank you, brett. Youve been just a wonderful host to us our whole time here. So to begin our book talked, we wanted to start with a thought exercise. So i want you to visualize something. I want you to picture a time in america when the country was sharply polarized along regional lines where the the east and the midwest were at odds with the rural, the south and heartland america. I want you to picture a time when our politics was gridlocked, when elections to congress were very closely fought, the control of congress switched back and forth every few years where the presidency president ial elections were also closely fought, and twice in a short period of time, the Electoral College delivered the victory to the candidate who did not win the most votes. I want you to picture a time when immigration was changing the face of the country in a way that worried a lot of people about what that meant for their own Life Opportunities and worried about what it would do to the character of the country. Yeah. And if you imagine further in america where you have Innovative New technologies that were transforming the way we communicate, the way we work, the way we live, making life more convenient and comfortable, but also creating a host of problems for democracy and our society more broadly. Imagine a time where economic inequality was increasing as a wealthy few hired the system to ensure that they could avoid contributing to the common good by paying their fair share of taxes. Now imagine a time when a conservative Supreme Court interpreted the constitution in ways that under mind, the fundamental guarantees of equality while blocking progressive reforms, advancing the interests of big corporations and the megarich, while ignoring the majority. Raise your hand if this sounds familiar. Well, yeah, well, maybe be surprised that were not talking about america in the 21st century. Were talking about america in 1899, the america of 1899 amending the constitution to revitalize an ailing democracy seemed impossible that year. The Washington Post published an editorial urging reformers to give up their hopeless efforts to add more amendments to the constitution. Its true, the paper said, that there is some disparities decide a faction with the constitution as it is. This is shown by the frequent proposal of amendments by the earnestness with which they are pressed. The attention of congress. They have been they have been demands made on congress for the submission of a woman suffrage amendment, an election by senators, by popular vote amendment, and various other amendments. Not one of them has any prospect of getting over that almost impassable route. For that reason, the editorials concluded, we may properly conclude that the constitution is un amendable, and yet just ten years later, in 1909, Congress Passed the First Amendment. In over 40 years, and by 1920, within just two decades after that dire prediction, americans added four very significant amendments to the constitution that really grappled with the problems of the time. So we added the 16th amendment, which made it which authorized the income tax and allowed modern government to exist. We added the 17th amendment that took the power to choose senators away from corrupt state legislators and gave it to the people. We added the ninth, the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote after 50 years of campaigning for that, and we added the 18th amendment, which the prohibition amendment, which people dont think of as a reform. But at the time it was meant to launch a noble experiment that america would be more prosperous, safer, more modern if we just could get rid of the poison known as alcohol. So but then, you know, a few decades later, its though its 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt was at a key moment in his presidency fighting against a Supreme Court that was overturning his new deal reforms and as wrote, as roosevelt battled the nine old men of the Supreme Court, he was urged to settle the matter by proposing a constitutional amendment that would clarify that the government had the power to pass the to enact these kinds of reforms. And he had big majorities in congress. But the president was unwilling to take that risk. And he said that it is, of course, clear that any determined Minority Group in the nation, without any great difficulty, could block ratification by one means or another. In 13 states for a long time. This pessimist view has been the norm in American History, and it prevails today. Its very common among experts. For example, professor richard albert, whos been a great friend of ours, and hes a highly respected scholar, says the Us Constitution is best understood as constructively amendable. It gives the impression that everything is freely amendable, but really nothing today is amendable. Another really leading scholar of Sanford Levinson argues its next to impossible to amend the constitution with regard to genuinely controversial issues, even if substantial and intense majorities are in favor of amendment. So having said that, we agree thats an understandable point of view. It is certainly hard to amend the constitution. It has only happened, as well hear tonight in certain periods in our history. Weve only had 27 amendments, but in our book we argue that difficult is not impossible. And as our book illustrates time and again, generation of americans have overcome this feeling of powerlessness, this feeling that this important tool of democratic participation is out of reach and not worth trying to put their imprint on our National Charter through this constitutional amendment process. So our book, the peoples constitution, tells the story of how American People have taken an imperfect constitution, a document that was both profoundly visionary and fundamentally flawed and molded it into their own. They did this through their extraordinary efforts. They made their country more democratic, more inclusive, and more suited to the needs of a changing country. And that was through the amendment process. These changes have come primarily in four distinct waves, as john has mentioned, arising from some of the most turbulent periods in American History. The 12 amendments of the founding era address some omissions in the original charter, most notably the dearth of comprehensive protections for individual rights and liberty. The reconstruction era amendments that they promised. The second founding in the wake of the civil war, they abolished slavery. The guaranteed equal citizenship, and sought to extend Voting Rights for black men while simultaneously imposing substantial limits on rogue state governments. In the progressive era, which we just described, the amendments sought to grapple with a modernizing nation beset by corporate greed and public corruption, by authorize wrong the income tax, providing for the popular election of senators. Extending the franchise to women and outlawing the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor and the civil rights era. In that era, through the amendment process as well. And those decided be less ambitious than the other constitution. All reforms of the prior eras, we continued to expand democracy, see the Voting Rights act, enfranchise long ignored populations, and to update president ial succession for the nuclea