The Constitution’s dysfunction extends far beyond any individual president. Thanks to its variety of “veto gates,” the document makes it nearly impossible to pass legislation truly meeting the problems facing the country.
That was the intention of the Founders. They wanted legislation to be difficult to pass in order to prevent a faction from shoving laws down the throat of the people.
The Framers simply didn’t anticipate how deeply partisanship would hollow out Congress’ willingness to hold a president accountable.
Partisanship developed from Day 1. Did the author forget about the battles between the Federalists v. Democratic-Republicans? The whole point of the Constitution was to prevent a faction, i.e., party from having unchecked power.
I took an OATH to that Constitution, not as a child, but as a MAN, not once but several times.
It was an HOLY oath, I declared unto God, to protect it against ALL enemies.
That oath still applies 100% with me.
There are millions like me.
Hands off!!!
So what’s your brilliant plan Politico? Give the government MORE power so Trump can do more.
Morons.
Government is working as intended. If partisanship reigns then the government does nothing which is as it should be! That’s not a bug - thats a feature!
The dysfunctional desperate delusional leftist progressive socialist communist fascist totalitarian loonybin-fit democrats need a reboot. Most of them don’t even know why they hate Trump and cannot tell you one bad thing Trump did that affected or will affect their life or the life of a loved one. They yell msm-dem group-think propaganda sound bites at Trump supporters.
MSM-dems don’t understand that it’s time to shake out the laundry and get rid of what is raggedy, old and doesn’t fit anymore and it’s the constitution that gives us the right to do so in a safe, non-violent way. It’s the terrorist-democrat party that began the first Civil War and has behaved mostly uncivil since then. Inflating their own narcissistic egos to irrationally think they know better then the nonviolent rest of us, who are pissed off at their dangerous government mismanagement and corrupt idealogies. They are ignoramuses, educated, but without wisdom or common sense. They must be stopped from destroying our government, our nation and the world. Leaders like the dems, who support rioting and mob violence against an innocent non-violent opposition are tyrants and need to be put in a long term time out.
Politico would have us use a 6k page Constitution worse than the Canadian version it would become a list of things the government can do to us and a never ending list of things the people cannot do.
F that idea.
We would have been a lot better off if we had had just ONE person willing to uphold the Constitution and prevent the Kenyanesian Usurpation.
Barack Obama is NOT a natural born citizen.
BOTH parties conspired to violate the Constitution.
This author is crazy. It is difficult to pass legislation? Maybe he should prove his point by reading the text of every law written since 1900. It wouldn’t take that long if his assertion is correct.
Leftists hate the Constitution because it thwarts their ambition to impose a highly centralized government which will enact socialism, strict gun confiscation, massive regulation of business and full bore Gaia Worship via the EPA. No surprise.
We don’t need a reboot of the constitution. We need to start following it again. That specifically means we need to strip away many of the powers the federal government usurped starting about 150 years ago, and return those powers to the sovereign states as the Founding Fathers intended.
Well all the Dictators and Socialists are doing ,LOL
I am embarrassed to admit that Sanford Levinson is a law professor at my alma mater, the University of Texas Law School. He was a contemporary of Elizabeth Warren, who also taught at UT before going to Harvard.
This is the legal thinking that is being taught to the new generation of attorneys and government officials. Any conservative views are penalized with low grades (trust me, I know from experience).
What needs a re-boot is the ability to understand the clear language of the document, and amend it where it no longer represents the societal consensus of our nation, also with clear language. Instead, they have debased the language and imposed chaos and randomness on the field of “constitutional law” so that it is incomprehensible to anyone who does not hold their progressive orthodoxy.
This guy and most of his fellow faculty need to be fired, but that will never happen. They keep getting appointed to even more prestigious endowed professorships.
This is nothing more than “we can’t get our way so we want to throw out the Constitution and start again”.
Of course their new Constitution, should they want one at all, would look nothing like the one we have.
Precisely! If you want to be a ‘social engineer’, start a commune and keep your approach to yourselves. Leave us alone. I would have been shocked if the author ‘Sanford V. Levinson’ wasn't indoctrinated in one of the moronic overrated Ivy League universities - and indeed he was (Princeton). I'm quite sure I have more years of education than he does, but that doesn't mean anything. The point is that we should never, ever, ever cede our self-determinism to a pseudo-elite pseudo-intellectual oligarchy. They are never qualified to do much of anything, except pontificate, and have a very, very bad track record when put in positions of power.
I would much rather have a plumber or carpenter decide critical issues than an Ivy trained attorney - unless it was specifically about a court case, lawsuit, or how to avoid one. Even then, I certainly wouldn't preferentially pick one with an Ivy education. I would pick one based on acumen and track record.
Sanford V. Levinson needs a boot to the head, then a reboot and another and another
1. The Electoral College is not a problem, it is a benefit; a benefit in tyring to help the nation remain a Constitutional republic (not a “democracy”). Blaming the electoral college comes from the error of not understanding unlimited one-man one-vote democracy does not work (leads to tyranny and eventual dictatorship) when applied beyond a local jurisdiction. We are a republic consisting of a nation of states, not a unistate, and the electoral college is part of insuring that the chief executive is elected by a majority of the states, according to their electoral strength identified by how many representatives they have in Congress.
When you look at a county by county map of the 2016 election results, you see why the electoral college is not only not a problem, but why it works. Such a map shows clearly that in as much as “the nation” is a collection of places - villages, towns, cities, counties and regions - the electoral college victor has - every time - captured more of the places that make up “the nation”. Hillary’s blue “popular vote” is swamped, across the country, in a sea of GOP red. THAT does not represent “a problem”.
2. Neither the Electoral College nor Article V of the Constitution (how to amned the Constitution) have anything to do with removal of a president. The author’s comment implying that one or the other also makes it harder to remove a president should have been a red flag to readers that the author does not know what they are talking about.
3. What the author considers as making it “too difficult” to remove a president was considered by the founders as constitutional speed bumps to insure presidents could only be removed to due the most egregious acts that would obtain a very wide consensus in Congress in favor of impeachment. That approach is a plus, not a minus, for a stable republic.
4. The author does not identify what “veto gates” he says makes passing legislation difficult, nor does he demonstrate which of any such “gates” are mandates of the Constitution and which are just rules & traditions the houses of Congress adopted for themselves.
5. In re: “Many Americans are rightly perturbed by Trump’s claim of near-dictatorial powers with regard to mobilization of the American military, control of immigration or the imposition of tariffs against one and all countries around the world.” The author is making stuff up. Trump has not grown for himself any powers with respect to the military, exercise of our immigration laws, or trade and tarriffs that the law had not already been granted to presidents, nor that Congress had previously restriucted presidents from using, including all of Trumps most recent predecessors. The author may not like how, why and to what end that Trump has done things, but nothing about it has been beyond the powers already demonstrated under law by his predecssors.
6. In Re: “And if a non-supine Congress actually did attempt to rein in the president by limiting powers it has delegated to him”. Ahhh, he admits he is really talking not about a tyrant taking illegitimate powers, but powers the people’s elected representatives have granted him.
7. In re: “the Constitution gives him veto power over any such legislation—and it would take two-thirds of each house of Congress to override such a veto.” Again, the author sees as a “bad” thing, that when the chief executive and the legislature may be at odds on legislation, that legislation could need to have more than a mere simple majority (51%) to rise above an executive’s veto. Again, that helps prevent the adoption of controversial legislation that does not have a super-majority behind it. That is a good thing, not a bad thing.
8. In Re: “The national Constitution, however, relies only on the character and judgment of a president to honor the independence of the attorney general and the Department of Justice...........The Framers simply didn’t anticipate how deeply partisanship would hollow out Congress’ willingness to hold a president accountable.”. No. The framers correctly saw the FEDERAL attorney general as part of the executive branch overseen by the chief executive. What the framers did not anticipate was that Congress and some chief executives would grant themselves powers - and thus extend the depth, breadth and length of federal law - beyond the limited enumerated powers the Constitution granted it. Wiht the Constitution breached, a federal attorney general holds powers the Constitution did not place in their hands. THAT is the problem.
The auhor neither understands the Constitution nor all the good reasons for so much in it that the author wrongly sees as “bad”.
More commie BS from an “academic”.
ACADEMIC: An individual educated beyond his intelligence who is unwilling to or incapable of creating or providing goods or services of value to others, who pontificates and expects to be paid for it, usually from public funds.
Elitist demons are having seizures.
Somehow, I think that if the Republicans decided to nuke cloture completely, and started passing Trump-favored legislation over the screams of the Dems, that this author would be among the first to start screaming hysterically.
There's stupid, and then there's "stupid on steroids."
No State ratified the Constitution without the Bill of Rights, which was not added to the "Final" Constitution until the end of 1791...
Anyone venerating (or disparaging) the "sacred" 1887 version is a certified idiot!