Ian Rowe writes about the political left’s most frequent attacks on the U.S. Constitution.
Progressive academics are making the case that the Constitution, far from being a tool to pursue our highest ideals, is in fact a threat to our freedom.Aziz Rana, a professor of law at Boston College, argues that the Constitution “has made our democracy almost unworkable.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, progressive dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, sees an “American government that is increasingly dysfunctional and that has lost the confidence of the people” — and blames “much of the problem” on the Constitution.New York Times critic Jen Szalai recently published an essay calling the Constitution “essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional,” a notion that “has been gaining traction, especially among liberals.”
The last caveat — “especially among liberals” — is telling.
While these anti-Constitutionalists decry political polarization as one of the symptoms of what Chemerinsky describes as the “bad bones” of the Constitution, it’s their dissatisfaction with the results of recent political debates that is driving their desire to overwrite the founding document.
Unhappy with the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade? Outlaw life tenure and increase the number of Supreme Court justices to ensure your political ideology dominates future decisions.
Opposed to the outcome of a presidential election in which the winner of the national popular vote loses? Abolish the Electoral College so that voters from large Democratic states like California would have a commanding influence over future presidential contests. …
… The irony of these proposed radical changes is they would upend the very constitutional provisions that protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Executive fiat, not a legislative process requiring deliberative bodies to negotiate and compromise, would govern us if the Constitution’s critics had their way.
