The process of German unification has been a series of political surprises. Before the chain of events of summer and fall 1989 that led to the fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, few could have predicted the “change of direction” (die Wende) of the government that followed. Fewer still would have suspected how quickly the overthrow of Honecker and his government would be supplanted by a drive toward economic and then political unification. In less than a year, on December 3, 1990, the GDR ceased to exist, being wholly absorbed as five new states in the existing legal and political structures of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). This has meant a wholesale restructuring of every social institution in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), not merely the economy; the method of unification chosen meant that all East German laws and organizations had to be brought into conformity with a virtually unaltered West German legal and social system.

This process has been troubled and troubling in many different respects, but not the least of the surprises to many observers has been the important role gender has played in the unification process. Not only did the government face sufficient protest that it needed to defer reconciling the different legal regulations of abortion in the two states, but shortly after the unification treaty was signed and its practical consequences began to be felt, the observation became commonplace that “women were the losers” in this process.

We are not free to vote abortion up or down because Roe v. Wade in 1973 made “freedom of choice” a basic constitutional right. Last June in the Casey case only two members of the Supreme Court upheld Roe unequivocally. Three others sustained it, but only on grounds of precedent. This suggests that, had they been writing on a clean slate, at least one of them might have joined the four dissenters to form a new majority. Even this anemic victory for Roe is compromised; seven of the nine justices upheld all but one of five challenged state restrictions on abortion (all of which had been held invalid by the District Court).

These anomalies spring from past perversions of the written Constitution, not from anything in the document itself. Here too “a page of history is worth a volume of logic.” Roe v. Wade purports to rest on the Fourteenth Amendment provision that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” This precept derives from the great settlemen at Runnymede in the year 1215. The crux of the matter was that the king (read government) could no longer punish his people at will, but only after guilt had been established via traditional trial procedures. No wonder this procedural right to a fair hearing found its way into the federal Bill of Rights (1791) and into every state constitution.

The Symposium on “Divided Government and the Politics of Constitutional Reform” in the December 1991 issue of PS highlighted the way that critiques of current governmental policies and perceived ailments in the body politic are so often followed in America by proposals for constitutional change. While it is possible, as a number of the symposium participants indicated, to question whether modern diagnoses of the problems are accurate or whether constitutional reforms are the answer, Petracca is certainly correct in telling fellow political scientists that “debate about constitutional and political reform is healthy for the polity because it is an opportunity to rediscover and reconsider America's first principles of government” (1991, 635).

While Petracca (1991, 634) reminded readers that critiques of divided government go at least as far back as Bryce's discussion in The American Commonwealth and Thurber mentioned Woodrow Wilson's reform efforts (1991, 653), it is rare to see a modern reformer who is fully aware of the legacy of reform proposals that now go back over 125 years. Even those who know the most about such history have been unaware of many plans. (See bibliography in Robinson 1985, 328-32; compare to Vile 1991b, 188-92.) This lack of knowledge is unfortunate because such information helps to put modern proposals like those of the Committee on the Constitutional System in perspective.

During the first Congress of the United States, two measures to amend Article I of the Constitution were considered which, if ratified, would have limited the number of successive terms held by senators and representatives. Those measures were defeated and the issue was not considered again for over 150 years. However, since 1943 when the proposal was first resurrected in Congress, interest in the idea has grown to the point that from January 1981 through February 1992 no less than 69 proposals to limit the tenure of our national legislators were introduced into Congress (Richardson 1991, 80-90, 93-100; Richardson 1992, 1).

Today the idea of limiting the number of successive terms a member of Congress may hold is hotter than ever. Fanned by the support of the 1988 and 1992 Republican National Conventions, and fueled by the efforts of several special interest groups, the idea has achieved high levels of public support nationally. A nationwide poll of likely voters conducted two weeks before the 1992 elections showed that 79% favored congressional term limitations (Shafer 1992). In an impressive burst of voter resolve, 15 states have passed amendments to their constitutions that attempt to limit the number of successive terms that their own U.S. representatives and senators may serve in office.