LAST month America's foremost Third Amendment rights group
celebrated two centuries of defending Americans' constitutional
right not to have soldiers quartered in their homes. “Keep the
fat hands of soldiers out of America's larders!” read the
T-shirts and bumper stickers. At least, according to the Onion,
a spoof newspaper.  But perhaps the satirists were making a
useful point. Some parts of America's venerated constitution do
sound out of date. The framers met in 1787 to craft a compromise
that might keep together a fissile federation of states beset by
powerful external enemies. The document's worst flaw—allowing
slavery to persist—was corrected in 1865. But the essential
framework within which America is governed has barely been
tinkered with since Thomas Jefferson's day. Larry Sabato, a top-
notch politics professor at the University of Virginia, thinks
it is time to give it an overhaul.  Most of his gripes are
reasonable. The Senate is horribly undemocratic. Because each
state elects exactly two senators