The Constitution of the United States is no longer working, according to a columnist in The Hill.
In an op-ed Tuesday, Catholic University politics professor John Kenneth White said that the Constitution is failing because the nation’s founding document could not handle increasing partisanship and distrust in American governmental institutions.
“The U.S. Constitution is the sacred text of American government and civic life. But it’s time to face facts: The document, written in 1787, isn’t working. The signs are all around us,” White wrote, citing a recent survey by Gallup that found that trust in institutions had declined precipitously over the last two decades.
The survey found that those who expressed either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the presidency dropped from 48% in 2001 to 38% this year. Confidence in Congress was more than halved, from 26% to just 12%. The Supreme Court also saw a significant decline in confidence, from 50% to 36%.
White first blamed the growing distrust in institutions on “a new breed of legislators who seek recognition and are largely uninterested in passing actual laws,” including Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and Madison Cawthorn (R-NC).
White also blamed the distrust on the executive branch as well. “Disappointing presidents have become the norm. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump failed to bring the country together,” he wrote. “Although it is early in the Biden presidency, voter disenchantment is already clear, and the unity he promised in his inaugural address seems as elusive as ever.”
White did not spare the judiciary from blame, either.
“Today, many see the courts not as arbiters of justice but inhabited by what Justice Amy Coney Barrett unsuccessfully tried to refute as ‘a bunch of partisan hacks,’” White wrote. He went on to argue that “judicial partisanship has escalated” since Bush v. Gore in 2000, with the high court’s demurring of the Texas abortion ban as the latest instance of alleged partisanship.
“The Constitution’s failures go much deeper,” White continued, saying that “the vagaries of congressional legislation have given the president the power to make laws through executive orders.” The result, he says, is a constant back and forth as presidents from opposite parties use Executive Orders to make policy, only to have those orders reversed by their successors.
Meanwhile, he adds, Congress is derelict in its duties. Among several issues, he accuses the legislative branch of deferring war-making power to the president, waffling on Congress’ subpoena power on a partisan basis, and using the filibuster to kill legislation in the Senate.
White concludes his argument by railing against alleged the anti-democratic nature of the Senate, electoral college, and conservative-majority Supreme Court.
“The Electoral College is poised to create more misfires, with popular vote winners not becoming president, as has happened twice already this century,” he writes, and “territorial expansion has resulted in 16 percent of the U.S. population controlling half the seats in the U.S. Senate… Meanwhile, the ‘strict constructionists’ of the Supreme Court resort to determining the original intent of a document written 234 years ago rather than understanding that it was a beginning, not an ending point.”
“It won’t be enough merely to reform the filibuster, add more justices to the Supreme Court, change presidents or surrender presidential powers to Congress. A document written in 1787 is inadequate for the 21st century,” White concludes. “Let’s face facts: The Constitution isn’t working.”