1) Amending the Constitution, these days, on any substantive issue, is impossible. You can't get 2/3rds of both houses to whistle 'Yankee Doodle' together, much less pass an amendment on an important issue in the fashion required by the Constitution. Therefore, the Human Life Amendment merely represents posturing, and one's support for or opposition to it just more posturing. Arguing over this type of amendments is just like arguing how many unicorns can fit atop a desk.
2) Huckabee's position on the morality (or not) of abortion, as well as his analogy to slavery, is valid (and I share it), but irrelevant to the Consitution. Amendment X is very specific, to wit:
'The Powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'
The Constitution says nothing whatever about abortion, either explicitly or implicitly. Therefore, the United States has no lawful, Constitutional authority to legislate upon the issue. Period.
Of course, we all know how scrupulously (cough, choke) the Regress obeys the Constitution, as in their utterly unlawful creation of the Dep'ts of Education and Energy, to name but two examples.
Even more difficult than getting 2/3 of Congress would be getting 3/4 of the states to approve. Only 13 states would need to hold out to prevent passage. IOW, the Northeast plus the Pacific Coast states.
An amendment is only possible when there is broad national consensus on an issue, as the Founders intended.
As you say, talking about passing amendments to settle highly controversial issues is pointless. Not gonna happen.
The Constitution does not address “abortion” directly. But you must understand that “abortion” emerged only recently as a sterile politically correct term for “feticide,” the murder of unborn children. So the “abortion” debate—or whatever the politically correct term of choice is this week—focuses squarely on the “right to Life,” as our Founders wrote. They did not contemplate that Americans of a later generation could slaughter literally hundreds of thousands of their children every year with complete impunity.
The Declaration of Independence tells us that men institute governments to secure the certain inalienable right to Life with which our Creator endowed us. The Right to Life then does not come from or through any level, organ, or agency of Government but from Almighty God Himself, and no Government can abolish it. The Preamble to our Constitution intended the document “to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ... our Posterity.” But our Posterity cannot reap the Blessings of Liberty if we massacre them before they gain the age and wisdom necessary to understand liberty.
We then have the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. I explained these in post #71 (I think), but they explicitly protect the Right to Life generally and specifically against State governments.
The Department of Energy finds little Constitutional justification (perhaps in regulation of commerce, but I’m not really sure that it does much of anything), and the Department of Education enjoys even less. We probably would get more energy and education without those two federal bureaucracies.