Saturday, November 25, 2023

Is It Time to Junk The Constitution?

 I do not mean to sound like Donald Trump calling for terminating the Constitution. For all I think Donald J. Trump's election shows the failure of the Constitution; particularly the Electoral College. See, the Electoral College was meant to keep rabble-rousers and those less trustworthy political motives gaining the office of the Presidency. Read  The Federalist Papers : No. 68

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.

  The Times Literary Supplement's Loser takes all: Why the US Constitution is no longer fit for purpose finds even more problems:

Shocking as all this may be, the US is hardly the only nation to suffer democratic backsliding. In their exceptionally perceptive and wide-ranging new book, Tyranny of the Minority, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt document the rapid unravelling of democracy in nations from Peru to Thailand, Third Republic France to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Developing themes from their previous book, How Democracies Die (2018), Levitsky and Ziblatt show how ruling democratic elites, threatened with a real or perceived erosion of social status and the prospect of electoral irrelevancy, will radicalize, turning against the very institutions and processes they once defended. Such backsliding, the authors insist, does not necessarily or inevitably lead to democratic collapse. It can be reversed, but this requires acts of political courage, particularly among the members of the party experiencing radicalization, along with ambitious political reforms that work to stabilize a wobbling constitutional order.
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More troubling still is the issue of political reform. As Levitsky and Ziblatt make clear, while pundits often declare that the US finds itself in a state of constitutional crisis, it is more accurate to say that the Constitution is the crisis. Drafted in Philadelphia’s steamy Independence Hall in the summer of 1787, it is the oldest continually operative constitution in the world. And for all its greatness and durability, it is now contributing to the country’s present political woes.

In theory a constitutional democracy should work to empower rule by majorities within the limits established by the constitutional order. The US Constitution, thanks both to an outmoded design and to historical demographic shifts, no longer works in this fashion. Instead it works to enshrine a system of minority rule. Take the method of presidential elections. Unable to settle on a system for choosing a chief executive, the drafters of the Constitution borrowed a device used by the Holy Roman Empire to “elect” monarchs and emperors. Almost from the off the Electoral College did not function as planned, because the framers failed to anticipate the role that parties would play in electoral politics, and it now leaves the US as the world’s only constitutional democracy that can elevate the loser of the national popular vote to the highest office in the land.

Then there is the Senate, which, as the result of another dreary compromise worked out in 1787, accords each state, regardless of population, with two senators. This means that Wyoming, with 580,000 residents, has the same power in the Senate as does California, with 39 million residents. In the early days of the republic, when all states were essentially rural and population discrepancies were less dramatic, this did not look quite so mad. Now the system works to give white rural conservatives vastly disproportionate power over states with large, urban, multi-ethnic populations.

We face the loss of democratic government. The fate of that is up to the people of this country. We need to change what is in the Constitution that has allowed the possibility of tyrants.

sch 11/9

 





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