by Jeremy Leaming
Perpetual campaigning for national offices, ongoing and intensifying gridlock in Congress and a Supreme Court that easily invalidates federal laws might be sensibly addressed if only it were easier to amend to the nation’s Constitution. As Sanford Levinson, a leading constitutional scholar writes in a column for The New York Times critical discussion of the Constitution’s imperfections and their impact on governance is needed, but often impossible to entertain because of the reticence to do so by prominent politicians.
First Levinson notes the problem, writing:
Our vaunted system of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘checks and balances’ – a legacy of the founders’ mistrust of ‘factions’ – means that we rarely have anything that can truly be described as ‘government.’ Save for those rare instances when one party has hefty control over four branches – the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court – gridlock threatens. Elections are increasingly meaningless, at least in terms of producing results commensurate with the challenges facing the country.
The nation’s founders, however, were not so wedded to an unchanging governing document. Indeed Levinson points to the Articles of Confederation, which many of the nation’s founders disparaged, and which was eventually dumped because it set up a weak central government.
But Article V of the Constitution, Levinson writes, makes it one of the world’s most difficult to amend.
On top of that few national leaders seriously question the Constitution’s adequacy. (He notes Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the last to publicly discuss drawbacks of the Constitution.)