The constitution is sacred and inviolable. It is the supreme law of the land and binds the people both individually and collectively. Whence it derives its legitimacy and supremacy we do not know inquire: for its legitimacy and supremacy must be conceded, or else we must maintain that we have no legal order, and are subject to mere arbitrary will, which whether the will of one, of the few, or of the many, is the essence of despotism. But if the constitution is legitimate and supreme, the people collectively and individually are under it, bound to obey it, and have and can have no power, directly, or indirectly, to alter its fundamental or essential character – consequently, are bound to the best of their ability to preserve it substantially as it is. The constitution, or the instrument we call the constitution, contains, indeed, a clause providing for its own amendment; but the constitution can authorize amendments only in its own interest, such as tend to preserve its original type or idea, and to secure or facilitate its realization.

On this power to amend there is much loose and even wrong thinking among our politicians. When the civil society is once constituted, it is supreme, the political sovereignty vests in it, and there is and can be, in that society, no power over it. The powers of the convention called to amend the constitution, whatever their limit or extent, are derived from the civil society, and can be only such as it can delegate. It can delegate all the powers it possesses, saving its own existence and supremacy as civil society. It cannot part with its inherent sovereignty, nor dissolve itself. But civil society exists in its constitution. The constitution is the fundamental law of the state, that which constitutes civil society, or gives to society its entity as a political or civil individual. Suppose the constitution, you suppose civil society; take away the constitution, you destroy civil society. As the general has no existence without the particular, the constitution does not create civil society in general, but a particular civil society, and therefore must be itself a particular civil constitution. Hence the existence of any given political society depends always on its particular constitution. Any essential change of that constitution will, then, be the dissolution of that particular civil society. But as no civil society can authorize its own dissolution, it follows that the convention can have no power, under the authority to amend the constitution, to touch, in any degree whatever, any of its essential principles, and is limited to such amendments as are perfectly compatible with the preservation of its fundamental and substantial character.

-Orestes Brownson, “The Republic of the United States,” 1849