I wrote an article about the constitutional amendment process and why it's practically a dead letter, which is a Bad Thing. It's bad because it frustrates strong national consensus, such as the Equal Rights Amendment which rose very close to the three-quarters-of-the-states requirement for ratification (It was ratified by 35 out of the 38 states necessary and ultimately failed). The Framers rightly but more or less arbitrarily chose to make the amendment process much harder than regular legislation. But they were operating in the dark--constitutions and their amendment processes were a brand new concept and so they didn't have much to draw on. Two super-majorities is tough, especially now with 50 states and 535 congresspeople.

Even Antonin Scalia, who staunchly revered the Constitution, thought the Article V amendment process was too restrictive. He reasoned that in order to block an amendment’s incorporation, a bare majority of the people within the thirteen least populous states could impede a proposal from reaching the three-fourths of states necessary for ratification. That comes to about 2% of the population. “It ought to be hard, but it shouldn’t be that hard.” (Interview with Scalia and Ginsberg)

The other danger about frustrating amendments is you force lawyers to lobby the Court to see their arguments as already existing in the Constitution rather than made out of whole cloth. Granted, I like some of the creative discovery of rights that the Court has found, but it can be unpredictable and cuts both ways. The Court constitutionalized a right to abortion in 1973, building on earlier discoveries of the right to privacy. In 2008/2010, it constitutionalized the private possession of firearms for self-defense, hunting, and sport, when the second amendment proscribes the federal government from neutering state militias by over-regulating firearms (and says nothing about state governments regulating the private possession of firearms by their civilians).

Amendments are tough.