A Farewell to the Constitution? | The New York Sun
https://www.nysun.com/article/a-farewell-to-the-constitution
This amazing and absolutely treasonous article is published in the New York Times:
The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed
Aug. 19, 2022
By Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn
“When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong. But 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 idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day. Our Constitution’s guarantee of two senators to each state is an example. And ever since the American founders were forced to add a Bill of Rights to get their handiwork passed, national constitutions have been associated with some set of basic freedoms and values that transient majorities might otherwise trample.
But constitutions — especially the broken one we have now — inevitably orient us to the past and misdirect the present into a dispute over what people agreed on once upon a time, not on what the present and future demand for and from those who live now. This aids the right, which insists on sticking with what it claims to be the original meaning of the past.
Arming for war over the Constitution concedes in advance that the left must translate its politics into something consistent with the past. But liberals have been attempting to reclaim the Constitution for 50 years — with agonizingly little to show for it. It’s time for them to radically alter the basic rules of the game.
In making calls to regain ownership of our founding charter, progressives have disagreed about strategy and tactics more than about this crucial goal. Proposals to increase the number of justices, strip the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction to invalidate federal law or otherwise soften the blow of judicial review frequently come together with the assurance that the problem is not the Constitution; only the Supreme Court’s hijacking of it is. And even when progressives concede that the Constitution is at the root of our situation, typically the call is for some new constitutionalism.
Where are Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn going with this? What are they proposing, and why has the “paper of record” given them a platform to shout it from?
The following paragraph will inform the reader where these two “scholars” are headed and what they are proposing:
“One reason for these woeful outcomes is that our current Constitution is inadequate, which is why it serves reactionaries so well. Starting with a text that is famously undemocratic, progressives are forced to navigate hard-wired features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, designed as impediments to redistributive change while drawing on much vaguer and more malleable resources like commitments to due process and equal protection “…
But they go further:
…” It is a breath of fresh air to witness progressives offering bold new proposals to reform courts and shift power to elected officials. But even such proposals raise the question: Why justify our politics by the Constitution or by calls for some renovated constitutional tradition? It has exacted a terrible price in distortion and distraction to transform our national life into a contest over reinterpreting our founding charter consistently with what majorities believe now.
“No matter how openly political it may purport to be, reclaiming the Constitution remains a kind of antipolitics. It requires the substitution of claims about the best reading of some centuries-old text or about promises said to be already in our traditions for direct arguments about what fairness or justice demands.”
Patriotic Americans have been saying for years that the Democrats are not satisfied with a constitutional republic based on the US Constitution and supported by the Declaration of Independence. But the deny this with their word while poroving us correct with their actions and subtext. Now the New York Times has allowed Doerfler and Moyn to come out and pronounce it prominently for the intire nation to see:
It’s difficult to find a constitutional basis for abortion or labor unions in a document written by largely affluent men more than two centuries ago. 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.
By leaving democracy hostage to constraints that are harder to change than the rest of the legal order, constitutionalism of any sort demands extraordinary consensus for meaningful progress. It conditions democracy in which majority rule always must matter most on surviving vetoes from powerful minorities that invoke the constitutional past to obstruct a new future.
After failing to get the Constitution interpreted in an egalitarian way for so long, the way to seek real freedom will be to use procedures consistent with popular rule. It will not be easy, but a new way of fighting within American democracy must start with a more open politics of altering our fundamental law, perhaps in the first place by making the Constitution more amendable than it is now.
In a second stage, though, Americans could learn simply to do politics through ordinary statute rather than staging constant wars over who controls the heavy weaponry of constitutional law from the past. If legislatures just passed rules and protected values majorities believe in, the distinction between “higher law” and everyday politics effectively disappears.
One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states. Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of the 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.
Patriotic Amerricans no longer have to guess, or presume what the Democrats are up to. their spokesmen have now shouted it from the rooftop of the New Yourk Times Building.
So please no more disenginuous whining about loving the Constitution from these Uber-Liberal Neo-Marxist leftist. We now have their number. We can now understand why the Biden regime is so intent on bringing America to her knees. Why the southern border has been thrown open for 6 million illegal aliens to flood into our nation unimpeded.
Let us see the final summation of what the NYTimes has allowed to be printed in their disgusting traitorous rag:
More aggressively, Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote, and perhaps even reducing the Senate to a mere “council of revision” (a term Jamelle Bouie used to describe the Canadian Senate), without the power to obstruct laws.
In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to a more democratic order — and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review. Fundamental values like racial equality or environmental justice would be protected not by law that stands apart from politics but — as they typically are — by ordinary expressions of popular will. And the basic structure of government, like whether to elect the president by majority vote or to limit judges to fixed terms, would be 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.
These are the final words and the final straw from Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale
The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed
Liberals need to radically change the rules of our politics.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/opinion/liberals-constitution.html
Are We Living In James Madison’s Nightmare?
Professors in the Department of Political Science address how our current government and society compare to the America James Madison feared.
By Tiarra Drisker ‘25
James Madison, a Founding Father also known as “The Father of the Constitution” and the fourth president of the United States, had a very detailed image of what a failed America would look like. Madison, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, wrote extensively in The Federalist Papers to warn a budding new democracy of the dangers of mob, or faction, rule.
When pondering about the possible contents of the Constitution, Madison was adamant about avoiding the mistakes other governments and societies made throughout history. He was so adamant that he read countless numbers of books on the history of these failed democracies. After hours upon hours of research, Madison came to a conclusion: direct democracy led to mob rule and political faction. According to Pew Research Center, now Democrats and Republicans are more ideologically divided than in the past and more democrats and republicans think the other party has policies that threaten the nation. Does this polarization reflect Madison’s nightmare?
“The ‘polarization’ that we are seeing today, while perhaps worrisome, is nonetheless a normal and continuing feature of American politics,” James Rogers, a professor in the Department of Political Science, said. “Indeed, while the political polarization we see today might be greater than existed during the 1950s in America, the evidence suggests that America today is perhaps less polarized than in the 1850s or 1920s. This is not to minimize the polarization that exists, but to recognize that polarization is not a novel feature of American politics. It is something that has always existed since the very start of the Constitution, with the bitter divide between Jefferson and Hamilton over the nature and power of the U.S. national government.”
The faction that Madison refers to actually has little to do with the individual parties and instead focuses on groups holding different beliefs on what advances the public good. To prevent the rise of factions and mobs, Madison supported the separation of powers that is evident in our government today, however, the laws in place to maintain that separation of powers may be being abused. For example, Republicans have not won a majority of the presidential vote since 2004 and they can control the Senate by winning small states but never commanding a majority.
“Madison designed a constitutional structure that would frustrate majorities,” Kirby Goidel, a professor in the Department of Political Science, said. “His reasoning was simple: democracies first gave way to demagogues then to mob rule and finally to tyranny. The contemporary climate turns Madison on his head. The checks and balances Madison put into place to protect against democratic majorities are being abused by political minorities. The Supreme Court is perhaps the most obvious example, though keep in mind that Republicans worked for 50 years to secure a conservative majority on the court by winning elections and timing retirements to assure conservative justices were replaced by Republican presidents. ”
While Madison’s structure is somewhat successful at preventing mob rule or demagogues, it still has its loopholes and makes it difficult for congress to tackle large issues.
“The rules allow either party to frustrate political majorities and assure nothing much gets done,” Goidel explained. “Our congress isn’t very productive. Long-term problems such as deficits and climate change go largely unaddressed, and we are failing to make adequate investments into research, education, and infrastructure: the type of investments that can yield long term benefits and a brighter future.”
Whether or not we are living within Madison’s nightmare is subjective, but there are things we can learn from his warnings and implement into our current government and society.
“Going forward, we are going to have to seriously rethink the Madisonian design,” Goidel shared. “Other political systems, based on proportional representation and with parliamentary systems, appear to be functioning more effectively. Our system encourages politicians to take visible stands while playing to their base constituencies, but doesn’t reward them for actually solving problems. “
https://liberalarts.tamu.edu/blog/2022/07/26/are-we-living-in-james-madisons-nightmare/