Author says ditching founding document will help “reclaim America.”
QUICK FACTS:
- An opinion essay published by The New York Times calls for the “broken” Constitution to be abandoned and “not be reclaimed.”
- The essay is titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” and penned by law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale.
- In their article, the professors asserted that Americans “radically alter the basic rules of the game” by no longer requiring judges to “justify our politics by the Constitution.”
- The authors called the Constitution “inadequate” as well as “famously undemocratic,” saying that they don’t understand why progressives even attempt to “justify our politics by the Constitution or by calls for some renovated constitutional tradition.”
- “It would be far better if liberal legislators could simply make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having to bother with the Constitution,” Doerfler and Moyn add.
PORTIONS OF THE ARTICLE:
- “When liberals lose in the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century — they usually say that the justices got the Constitution wrong,” the Times essay says. “But struggling over the Constitution has proved a dead end. The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
- “The idea of constitutionalism is that there needs to be some higher law that is more difficult to change than the rest of the legal order. Having a constitution is about setting more sacrosanct rules than the ones the legislature can pass day to day.”
- “Our Constitution’s guarantee of two senators to each state is an example. And ever since the American founders were forced to add a Bill of Rights to get their handiwork passed, national constitutions have been associated with some set of basic freedoms and values that transient majorities might otherwise trample.”
BACKGROUND:
- Both authors are professors of law at their respective universities, with Roerfler’s research focused primarily on “the role of the judiciary within a democratic system,” according to his Harvard Law School faculty page.
- The Harvard professor also holds a PhD in philosophy and has been published in a number of other publications.
- Yale Law School has Moyn listed as Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University who has written books on European history and human rights.
