The New York Times published an op-ed on Friday by two Ivy League law professors who argued that our “broken” and “famously undemocratic” U.S. Constitution “stands in the way” of “real” freedom and democracy.
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.”
Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale claim in their essay, titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” that 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 essay also claims that constitutions, and “especially the broken one we have now,” direct us to the past, something that “aids the right” which tends to stick “with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.”
Though liberals have attempted to “reclaim” the Constitution for half a century, the essay claims they have “agonizingly little to show for it” while calling to “radically alter the basic rules of the game.”
“[E]ven when progressives concede that the Constitution is at the root of our situation, typically the call is for some new constitutionalism,” they write.
Calling the current Constitution “inadequate” and “famously undemocratic,” the authors wonder why progressives bother to “justify our politics by the Constitution or by calls for some renovated constitutional tradition.”
“It would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution,” they add.
“Real freedom,” they write, will be a “new way of fighting within American democracy” with a “more open politics of altering our fundamental law.”
“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.”
“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.
Last month, a Rasmussen Reports survey revealed that most Democrats believe the U.S. Constitution is fundamentally “racist” and “sexist.” So there you have the confirmation — the Democrats are anti-Constitution. They hate our founding documents and our founding ideals, all of which stand in the way of their naked lust for power — oops, I mean their “constant reinvention of our society.”