On Monday Breitbart posted an article about a New York Times opinion piece posted on Friday. I am not linking to The New York Times piece because it is behind the paywall.
Breitbart reports:
The “broken” and “famously undemocratic” U.S. Constitution “stands in the way” of “real” freedom and democracy, according to a New York Times op-ed by two Ivy League law professors.
The pair issued a call to “radically alter the basic rules of the game” by no longer requiring us to “justify our politics by the Constitution.”
A Friday New York Times essay, titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” and penned by law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale, claims when liberals “lose in the Supreme Court” they often blame justices for misreading the Constitution, yet in reality, “struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end.”
“The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism,” the authors assert, as they attack the “some centuries-old text.”
The article shares the solution proposed by the professors:
Accusing “constitutionalism” of “leaving democracy hostage to constraints that are harder to change than the rest of the legal order,” the essay argues the way to seek “real freedom” will be a “new way of fighting within American democracy” with a “more open politics of altering our fundamental law,” suggesting that the Constitution be made “more amendable” than it currently is.
“One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states,” the authors write. “Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of [politics] and break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.”
However, the authors state, Congress could “openly defy” the Constitution to “get to a more democratic order,” with the basic structure of government being “decided by the present electorate, as opposed to one from some foggy past.”
“A politics of the American future like this would make clear our ability to engage in the constant reinvention of our society under our own power, without the illusion that the past stands in the way,” they conclude.
The piece comes as many on the left continue to attack the epic founding governmental document.
Just for the record, we are not a democracy, we are a representative republic.
Why don’t we just put all of the people who want to get rid of the Constitution on a fairly large island and let them govern it using their ideas? We could take bets on how long it would take to reenact Lord of the Flies.