Empower Wisconsin | Oct. 22, 2020
By Steven Hayward, Powerline
Forget court-packing, abolishing the electoral college, or adding Puerto Rico and DC as states to provide more Democrats in the Senate (which they’d like to abolish in any case if they could): their real target is the Constitution itself. Apparently it isn’t “living” enough for the left, so they want to kill it completely.
The New Republic magazine makes this abundantly clear in an article just out called “The Constitution Is the Crisis.” Here is the relevant portion of this long and tedious article:
Republicans haven’t flouted the constitutional order. They’ve made use of it. Things haven’t gone wrong because a system that was humming along fine until recently has been damaged in some fundamental way. The system is humming along essentially as it always has with increasingly dire results. The crisis is not that the American constitutional system is broken but that the American constitutional system is working—perhaps not as the Framers intended but, as a legal and administrative matter, mostly as it was designed to. . .
One alternative idea gaining currency among progressives is jurisdiction-stripping—Article III of the Constitution gives Congress the power to limit the Supreme Court’s authority to hear certain cases. In 1982, John Roberts, then at the Department of Justice, actually wrote memos defending the practice. And as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project argued recently, policymakers could conceivably attempt to ignore the Supreme Court entirely. “All the president has to do is assert that Supreme Court rulings about constitutionality are merely advisory and non-binding, that [Marbury vs. Madison] was wrongly decided, and that the constitutional document says absolutely nothing about the Supreme Court having this power,” he wrote. “You don’t need a constitutional amendment. You don’t need to pass a law. And you don’t need to appoint any judges. This is a completely reasonable position that also reflects the kind of power top courts have in other countries.”
But remember—it’s Trump who is “shredding” the norms of American democracy.
Read more at Powerlineblog.com
