Is there a rule that government actors don’t change the Constitution?

Will Baude says there is:

At an empirical level, I think it is certainly possible for constitutional change to occur through mini-revolutions or political evolution. But there remains the question of one, whether those changes are valid under our current legal rules, and two, whether they really occurred. I would say our current legal rules honor an important relevant principle in the text: government agents are not authorized to make constitutional change. They take an oath, and it is an oath to apply “this Constitution” that we have, and that reflects an important limit on the power that we the people have delegated to them. The people may well have a right to ignore the Constitution, but the government officials who happen to be their agents do not.

I can’t make sense of this passage. How can constitutional change through a mini-revolution or political evolution occur and not be “valid under our current legal rules”? Doesn’t constitutional change of this sort just mean that the rules aren’t valid or are incomplete? Isn’t that what happened in 1789? No one cares that the 1789 text is invalid under the Articles of Confederation.

Will then goes on to make a distinction between the “people” ignoring the Constitution and government officials. But this brings us back to 1789. Should government officials have declined to obey the 1789 text because they are “officials” rather than “the people”?

It may be that Will is focused on government officials acting without the people’s blessing. But what if they in “good faith” (quoting Will again, as he suggests in another passage that justices act in good faith) believe that the people have chosen to change the Constitution? Aren’t they then obligated to defer to the will of the people? And note on this view limited government prevails: government officials can change the Constitution (or, I would say, recognize a change in the Constitution) only if they believe in good faith that the people have changed the Constitution. The oath clause argument is circular: the question is whether it refers to an unchanging text or evolving norms.

Will’s first sentence is a large concession that is hard to square with originalism. Even if he thinks that no such evolution has occurred, he seems constrained to acknowledge that if it can occur, justices and other government agents should be on the lookout for changes in the people’s constitutional understandings, and should act accordingly if such changes occur.