Yale law and political science professor Bruce Ackerman is certainly no friend of our written constitutional forms. In his book, We the People: Foundations, he advocates an informal constitutional “amendment” process, whereby the people may skirt what he calls the “classical” amendment process that was “sketched by the Founding Federalists in Article Five of the original Constitution.” In its place, Ackerman writes, the people may indicate their support for constitutional change through the regular electoral process.  Afterward, instead of “confront[ing] a laconic text of high abstraction inscribed in a formal constitutional amendment,” Supreme Court justices should provide “codification” of this informal constitutional change “without insisting on a formal Article Five amendment.”

Yet even Ackerman wants President Obama to come clean about the legal advice that he got and followed in recently installing controversial figures into office without Senate consent. Obama issued “recess” appointments to fill those positions when the Senate — which is controlled by his own party — wasn’t even in recess.