A chancellor with unchecked power altering the constitution whenever he wants to stay in power forever? Yeah, no government has ever worked like that.
Can you truly call that a working government?
Counterquestion: Is the Republic in ROTS a working government?
This whole scenario in this movie reminds me of the dying days of the Weimar Republic. During that time the parliament had little power and the chancellor was ruling with emergency powers authorized by the president, until he had enough and appointed a new chancellor.
This sounds almost exactly like the Chancellor appointing governors to bypass the senate in ROTS.
Now after Hindenburg died, Hitler took over and was now chancellor AND president. And it took only a few months until he had crippled the constitution to a point, that it barely deserved the name. He arrested many political enemies and suspended a number of articles and thus abolished all personal rights. After that the parliament had to surrender their legislative power to him, it’s important to point out that armed forces were present when the law was passed.
There you have your amendments to the constitution. With that in mind it’s really not that much of a silly line, but more of an expression of what state the Republic is in.
It’s more similar to the last days of the Roman Republic, when Augustus basically centered all power while keeping the Senate alive (and calling himself “primus inter pares”) as a facade.
Plus (without opening a discussion here, that’s the last thing I want) I think that line today is even more actual than it was back when the movie released. In Italy (I have a huge interest in politics, and I know some members of Parliament) the Parliament is being completely ignored by the government, thanks to the pandemic. Both last governments basically exploited every small clause in the Constitution in order to overrun the Parliament, which at this moment is basically powerless.