Life of our charter.(America's Constitution: A Biography)(Book Review)

America's Constitution: A Biography, by Akhil Reed Amar (Random House, 672 pp., $29.95)

THE idea of Akhil Amar's new book is brilliantly simple. The execution of that idea is very good, but not quite as good as one might have hoped.

The idea is this: to give an account of the text of the Constitution--of the thinking and acting that produced it and of the sort of country it envisioned and produced in turn--by marching through its parts in their proper order, from the Preamble to the 27th Amendment. Though not as original an idea as Amar thinks it is, it has the virtues of both ambition (being a "biography" of a life of more than two centuries) and some natural boundaries set by the document itself.

Amar writes with fluidity and grace, with only a few of the tics of the legal academic, and he keeps his conversations and disputes with other scholars confined mostly to the endnotes. These qualities are helpful to the general reader who has an interest in the Constitution and its history but fears treading the spongy ground of modern legal scholarship.

Not that Amar shies away from arguments. He makes plenty of them, from his opening account of the Preamble, effectively exploding what remains of the old states'-rights argument for a constitutional right of secession, to his concern 400 pages later that the 25th Amendment (combined with an earlier statute still on the books) leaves us with some serious potential problems regarding presidential succession in a crisis. This is no bland celebration of the Constitution for Framer-worshippers, but a book of large provocations, liberally peppered with surprising observations, small but fascinating insights, and unexpected connections.

Did you ever stop to ponder, for instance, the democratic thrust of the Constitution's requirement that members of Congress be paid a salary? Did you ever notice that presidents are not pledged by their oath "to abide by every act of Congress" without exception? Or wonder whether impeachment is the only way for Congress to secure the removal of a federal judge? Have you thought about what difference it has made that all the amendments to the Constitution have been added to its end, rather than incorporated in its midst? Amar has thought about all these things and many more, and he invariably has interesting things to say about them.

The book is sometimes marred, for several pages at a stretch, by odd little obsessions and dubious arguments. Amar asserts, more than he argues, that the 14th Amendment was intended to "incorporate" the Bill of Rights to apply against the states, while barely acknowledging how controversial this view remains. And he wastes much space on refuting the rather silly arguments of his Yale colleague Bruce Ackerman that the 14th Amendment was not ratified in proper accordance with the Constitution. These tedious sections should have been caught by an editor with the courage to say, "Um, Akhil, do you really need to settle that score here?"