President Donald Trump isn’t even currently in office but his mere existence has such a powerful effect on Politico founding editor John F. Harris that he wants to drastically rewrite the U.S. Constitution. Rather than be embarrassed about wanting to upend the document that guarantees our freedoms and form of government, Harris proudly declared to the entire world on Thursday, “The Best Way To Save The Constitution From Donald Trump Is To Rewrite It.”
However, this is not really changing the political infrastructure to immunize against the Trump virus. It’s an excuse to change our form of government away from the federalism and limited government Harris clearly despises.Trump exploited everything “problematic” in the Constitution:
…Trump is properly seen as a constitutional menace, but from a progressive perspective many of the most offensive features of his tenure were not in defiance of the Constitution. Instead, they flowed directly from its most problematic provisions. He was in office in the first place because the presidency is chosen by the Electoral College rather than by the popular vote. His influence will live for decades because partisan manipulation of the Senate’s judicial confirmation power gave him three Supreme Court justices, who have no term limits and face no practical mechanisms of accountability. Like some other presidents, but more so, he used the Constitution’s absolute pardon power for nakedly self-interested reasons. In short, Trump may be an enemy of the Constitution but he is also the president who most zealously exploited its defects.
“Defects” and “infirmities” in our Constitution have to be removed, and somehow it’s not the Left that doesn’t like how democracy is working:
…Correcting or circumventing what progressives reasonably perceive as the infirmities of the Constitution, in fact, seems likely to be the preeminent liberal objective of the next generation. Progress on issues ranging from climate change to ensuring that technology giants act in the public interest will hinge on creating a new constitutional consensus. Trying to place more sympathetic justices on the Supreme Court is not likely to be a fully adequate remedy. There are more fundamental challenges embedded in the document itself — in particular the outsized power it gives to states, at a time when the most urgent problems and most credible remedies are national in character.
So who is the real enemy of the Constitution, Mr. Harris? Trump or yourself who wants to drastically alter it into basically an alternate document that gets rid of the federal system our government is based upon? Next, these early amendments have to go:
A constitutional renovation would clean up the infuriatingly murky language of the Second Amendment to make clear if effective gun control is allowed if the guns have nothing do with a “well-regulated militia.”
Yeah, so “wondrous and enduring” that Harris wants a “constitutional renovation” into an alternative document that subverts the intention the current one.
By 2040, 70 percent of Americans will live in just 15 states. That means 30 percent of the population — coming from places that are less diverse and more conservative — will choose 70 senators. Already each senator from Wyoming, the least populous state, exercises his power on behalf of less than 600,000 people, while each senator from California, the most populous, represents nearly 40 million. This distortion of democracy, already hard to defend, could become the defining feature of national life.
All the “flaws” in the Constitution seem to be the things that keep the Democrats from having complete control. It’s a “distortion” to let small states dictate things when New York and California should be dominating. And if this hostility towards the Constitution is a prevalent attitude at Politico, what does that say about a site dedicated to covering politics when there is no respect for our founding document?