[T]he US Constitution is a written constitution—a single, specific authoritative document. The Preamble declares that "We the People of the United States" have ordained and established "this Constitution." The written-ness of the Constitution matters enormously. America's Constitution is a specific written document, not a collection of traditions or practices—as in Great Britain, which is said to have an "unwritten" constitution. In America, there is no "unwritten constitution." The boundaries of what may be done in the name of the Constitution are marked by the words, phrases, and structure of the document itself.
This point probably strikes most people today as so obvious as barely to require mentioning. But in the eighteenth century this was a dramatic innovation. Before America, a nation's "constitution" referred to its established, traditional pattern of government practice. America gave the word a fresh meaning: the Constitution of the United States is a written charter of government, supreme over all other laws, limiting the actions of all government officials and setting forth the rights and liberties of the people. Our entire system of government thus rests on the authority of a written document, not on an unwritten tradition, and certainly not on whatever government officials happen to decide at any given point in time. In America, the fundamental rules of the game are written down, and intended to be binding.
To be sure, the written Constitution has changed over time. There are now twenty-seven amendments, adopted between 1789 and 1992 under a detailed process prescribed by the Constitution itself in Article V. . . . In addition, interpretations of the Constitution's words have changed over time—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Ultimately, however, the words themselves are what matter. The written-ness of the Constitution is its first and most distinctive characteristic.
(Michael Stokes Paulsen and Luke Paulsen, The Constitution: An Introduction [New York: Basic Books, 2015], 25 [italics in original; ellipsis added])
