Polarized politics, 1787

In the United States, the bitter charge that a majority that wants to bring an ambitious project to a vote is trying to ram it down our throats has a long pedigree.  In Pennsylvania, the first state to ratify the Constitution, such was the lament of the minority who were either opposed to ratification, undecided, or in favor of making ratification conditional on the opportunity to amend.

Moreover, the minority was right, according to the narrative stitched together by Pauline Maier in  Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  Pennsylvania proponents of the Constitution wanted to be the first to ratify. They convened the ratifying convention in November, just two months after the framers completed their work, and before copies of the Constitution had had time to fully penetrate the enormous rural expanse of the state. In fact they scheduled the ratifying convention before Congress had decided the manner in which it would present it to the states.  That led a conditional supporter of the proposed new scheme of government, Robert Whitehill, to complain, "I don't know any reason there can be for driving [the Constitution] down our throats, without an hour's preparation"...unless it was "a plan not fit for discussion" (p. 61). 

Levinson's "Our Undemocratic Constitution": a book whose time has come?

This Swampland roundup of disaffection with the Beltway reminds me why this weekend I was moved to check out of the nearest college library Sanford Levinson's Our Undemocratic Constitution (2006), a book whose moment, I would think, has arrived. From Swampland:

--D.C. dysfunction seems to be the theme of the day. Bayh says it's why he's retiring. Former Clinton chief of staff and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, citing GOP obstructionism, says the political environment "sucks." Tea Party angst over big government run amok lands on the front page of the New York Times. A Wall Street Journal headline trumpets: "Senate Woes Flag Wider Disease." The efficacy of Washington today can certainly be debated -- Norman Ornstein recently argued the 111th Congress has been the most productive in decades -- but there is at least a widespread perception that something is broken inside the beltway.

In Our Undemocratic Constitution, Levinson argues that we need a Constitutional Convention to adapt the document to our current needs. He portrays the Constitution as a blueprint for legislative sclerosis and misrepresentation of the will of the people. He indicts the "triple veto" on legislation: the Senate can kill a House bill, the House a Senate bill, and the President a House-Senate bill. He details the distortions and indeed dangers imposed by long lame-duck tenures for Congress and for the President.  He laments the power that life tenure confers on unelected judges, and exposes dangerous ambiguity in the delineation of the powers of the President..  Overarching all is the Constitutionally imposed difficulty of amending the Constitution; Levinson points out that "no other country -- nor, for that matter, any of the fifty American states -- makes it so difficult to amend its Constitution." But the centerpiece of democratic dysfunction is, natch, the Senate.