Mrs. Elizabeth Powel asked Dr Benjamin Franklin, “ so what have we got? A Republic, or a Monarchy?”
Dr Franklin answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
But today you find so many talking about “Democracy”. Democracy is two wolves and a lamp arguing about what to have for dinner. It is mob rule.
The republic our founding fathers gave to us is amazing. The people have done much to damage it, making the election of senators a popular vote being one of my least favorite changes.
The fact that they were able to put it all on four pages plus the bill of rights is in itself amazing. If you were to look at other constitutions you find hundreds if not thousands of pages, most of which translate into “Unless the government wants to.”
Our Constitution lays out our form of government and then sets acknowledges the some of the rights given to us by our creator. Rights the exist regardless of government.
The Atlantic is left leaning. They love to pontificate from the basis of false premises and to build their arguments.
The Constitutional Flaw That’s Killing American Democracy is one such article. Yes, our Constitution protects the Republic, not “American Democracy.”
So what does Jedediah Britton-Purdy think the flaw in the Constitution is? According to the author it is the fact that it is just so darn hard to change the Constitution.
The Constitution doesn’t have to be something we merely inherit; it could be something we can change ourselves—starting with rewriting the too-stringent rules for making such changes.
People on the left seem to crave power. How the get there never seems to bother them, as long as they get the power they want. When the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate they decided to kill the filibuster in regards to judicial appointees, because the Republicans were just nah sayers. All they ever did was say “NO”.
So the filibuster was killed. The Democrats loved it. Until that exact moment when the Republicans took control of the Senate. At which point they started screaming that the filibuster should be reinstated. It is always the way of the Left. They change the rules and tell us the new rules are good, up until the moment those same rules are used against them.
Some federal judge in California doesn’t like Trump’s executive order because it will harm some set of people or return to the status quo of pre Obama? Then it is just wonderful that the judge puts a nation wide injunction against that EO.
Some judge in Texas finds that Biden’s EO is unconstitutional and articulates the reason why and it is absolutely unacceptable that a single man in a black robe stop a Presidential Executive Order.
But the Constitution is too fundamentally antidemocratic a document to serve democratic purposes reliably. If we want to make it genuinely and lastingly democratic, we will first have to consider changing it in the most basic way: by amending Article V, which governs amendments and so serves as the gatekeeper for living generations …
For years SCOTUS turned out liberal opinions that were only loosely based on the Constitution but reflected “the will of the people.” The will of the people is written in our Constitution. The will of the people can change that document. Having a “living constitution” which is malabule to whatever the current leftist judge wants it to say is not good law, it is not good government.
The Constitution limits our Government. It is not there to limit us. It is not there to give the government power over us.
But the root of judicial oligarchy is that the Constitution is almost impossible to change. Article V requires that amendments be ratified by three-quarters of the states, either through the state legislatures or in special conventions. (The convention route has happened only once, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933.) The upshot is that it takes only 13 states to block a proposed amendment. And to send an amendment to the states in the first place, the proposed language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress.
Today many of the arguments by the left start with an ad hominem attack. Instead of looking at what the Constitution actually says they attack it because it was written by “cis white males”. Here’s the thing, just because you don’t like the person or the people, that doesn’t mean that what they created isn’t good or true.
We must continue to stand up to the lies our opponents tell. We must continue to call out the messages of hate the spue. We are freemen and will continue to be free for as long as we can keep it.
Good article!
I coined the First Axiom of Politics for exactly that reason.
“It is not the action taken by the person that causes the offense.
It is the political affiliation of the person taking action that causes the offense.”