Constitution

by Jeremy Leaming

Despite attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel who appear to have produced a lengthy justification for targeted killings that skewers the English language to wend its around constitutional principles such as due process before the government can deprive a person of liberty, President Obama has nonetheless taken solid action to counter the right’s take on the Constitution as a document that limits government’s ability to take collective action to protect and advance the nation’s welfare.

In a piece for The New Republic, Simon Lazarus, senior counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center, says it’s about time – likely long overdue -- that progressives provide a compelling alternative to the right’s simplistic, but effective rhetoric of a Constitution that is all about individual rights and a weak central government.

Quickly after the president provided some staunchly liberal rhetoric in his Second Inaugural address, Republican lawmakers, such as Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-K.Y.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) brayed that the president was ushering in or attempting to an age of radical liberalism. Grassley, as noted here, also groused that the president had turned the Second Amendment on its head by arguing that new measures aimed at curbing gun violence were no threat to the individual right to bear arms.

The president’s rhetoric on the Constitution, Lazarus writes, “echoes that of the Reconstruction Congresses which enacted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In line with then-existing Supreme Court precedent, they believed Congress empowered to prevent interference with the exercise of individual rights created by constitutional prohibitions on government. Specifically, they held the federal government responsible for preventing private violence and intimidation designed to deter former slaves from voting and enjoying other constitutionally prescribed liberties. And they wrote into the amendments express authority for Congress to ‘enforce’ that responsibility.”  

By Dr. John R. Koza, Chairman of National Popular Vote

The Constitution provides a built-in mechanism for fixing the shortcomings of the current system of electing the president.

The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the president is that four out of five states, and four out of five Americans, are politically irrelevant in presidential campaigns. After being nominated in 2012, President Obama conducted campaign events in just eight states, and Governor Romney did so in only ten. Just ten states received 98 percent of the $940 million spent on advertising by the two campaigns and their supporters.

These problems are caused by state winner-take-all statutes (that award all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate receiving the most popular votes in each separate state). Because of these state winner-take-all statutes, presidential candidates have no reason to pay attention to the concerns of voters in states where they are comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind. The common feature of the ten states that received attention in the 2012 presidential campaign was that the eventual winner received 53 percent or less of the state’s vote -- that is, they were closely divided “battleground” states.