It’s Democrats who don’t believe in the Constitution
Opinion by Hugo Gurdon, Washington Examiner, 9/20/23
In what amounts to his congressional exit interview, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) told the Atlantic magazine, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”
He didn’t say who he meant but it surely included former President Donald Trump, who falsely claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and who did next to nothing to stop the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. (Incidentally, Trump is banging that drum less after building his massive Republican primary lead, and it seems he’s come to see he can expunge the humiliation of defeat more effectively by winning the 2024 nomination than by bleating ad nauseam about “the steal.”)
Romney probably also intended to condemn Trump supporters and non-repudiators. This is weaker ground. Yes, some Republicans in Congress and the last administration are MAGA believers, but many aren’t. The Atlantic confirmed this by reporting that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said others in the GOP agreed with him but could not speak candidly.
The reason these non-repudiators won’t denounce Trump isn’t due to any disrespect for the Constitution, it’s to avoid alienating MAGA voters, which would gift the federal government to Constitution-trashing Democrats. Likewise, admirable people worked in the Trump administration (and told him he was wrong) in the honorable belief that they’d do more good as wise counselors inside the tent than as outsiders openly disdaining Trumpist officials.
Equally, many ordinary Trump supporters and a majority of the Capitol mob believe in the Constitution. Most thought they were defending it because they credulously believed their champion that it was being traduced. Condemning the GOP broadly for rejecting the Constitution requires blind partisan or anti-conservative bias. Although Romney aimed his Parthian shot at his own party, Democrats and the Left reject the Constitution more consistently and explicitly than their opponents do.
They say it themselves. CNN recently hosted a discussion for which the headline was, “Scholars warn outdated Constitution has put democracy at risk.” Headlines that include phrasing such as “scholars warn” usually express an opinion of the media outlet, disguising an opinionated effort to change viewers’ minds as news. When a reliably leftist organization such as CNN has two Harvard professors as guests for a segment attacking the Constitution, you know the hosts agree with the speakers’ opinions and agenda.
CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta poses — the mot juste — tendentious questions while maintaining an expression of doe-eyed curiosity, and it was thus that he asked the authors of this “very important book,” professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, why “our democracy is in peril,” and to explain their title, Tyranny of the Minority.
Levitsky explained, “We are the only presidential democracy … where the president can lose the popular vote and become president,” where the party that loses the popular vote can and “routinely does control the Senate,” and where “justices have lifetime tenure.” This allows “political minorities to systematically thwart and sometimes even govern over majorities.”
This is true so far as it goes, but it does not go very far. To the authors and Democrats, democracy is in danger if 50% plus one voter don’t get their way. But that is exactly what the obstructive Constitution was designed to avoid. It sets guardrails to prevent a tyranny of the majority.
Democrats simply assume that the only majority that counts is the majority of voters. But our union was established by the Constitution on the shared understanding that compromise was needed between the majority of voters and, say, the majority of states. In 2016, Donald Trump won 30 of the 50 states and 304 Electoral College votes to Hillary Clinton’s 227. She, however, won 2.9 million more votes nationally than he did and 4.2 million more in California. It is no democratic deficit to protect the 30 red states and the whole nation from having their president chosen by California alone.
Democrats and the Left increasingly push to undermine the Constitution by scrapping the Electoral College, which they stoutly defended in 2000, when Vice President Al Gore was wrongly forecast to win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. They reversed themselves and abandoned that democratic principle when voters inverted that split.
The Constitution is the set of rules under which states were admitted to the union. The rules can be changed in the future as they have been in the past, but only by agreement among the states, which means gathering cross-party democratic support. Democrats’ distaste for the Constitution is glaringly obvious in their attacks on the Electoral College, the system of Senate representation, and in their smear campaign against Supreme Court conservatives. They, rather than Republicans, see the founding document as simply an impediment to implementing their agenda. Their agenda is the seizure of power, nothing more, nor less. They do not care for the document that legitimizes but also constrains their exercise of power.