The Constitution should do just that.

This election will be a trial (of sorts) for the Constitution……

I wrote recently of the problem that former lead man Trump could have with the 14th Amendment to our Constitution…..

Trump’s 14th Amendment Problem?

Now I ask can the Constitution saves us from ourselves?

Winston Churchill once exclaimed that ” democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  With democracy facing challenges in the US the likes that perhaps not seen since the Civil War, the question is what to do.

This question takes on exceptional salience with the coming 2024 presidential elections and the prospect that Donald Trump could again be re-elected.   This has prompted some to call for some to employ the Fourteenth Amendment to declare Trump an insurrectionist and declare him ineligible for office.  As attractive as this solution may sound, it is a dangerous tool to solve  a pressing problem.

Democracies can produce their own antithesis. The Democratic German Weimar Republic elected Hitler and the Nazis who annihilated the popular government. Across the world we see similar problems in Hungary, Poland, and perhaps Israel.  Our constitutional framers saw this potential too.

Democracy, including that in the US, is an experiment in the people ruling, and it is still not clear if it works.  The American Experiment according to historian James McGregor Burns was that of being the first popular government in history. While one can challenge whether the elite framers who were slaveholders truly were interested  in popular government, let’s assume they were.  For James Madison, perhaps the principal architect of the Constitution and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers the challenge of popular government or what we call representative democracy today is to protect it from majority faction, mob rule, populism, or what others have called the tyranny of the majority.

The fear was that the passions of the people would swell up and produce a majority faction, defined as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

The political solution to the problem of populism was creating a system placing breaks on the mobilization of power through separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, staggered political terms, and an electoral college. Yet somewhere along the line these mechanisms have failed .

Protecting Democracy From Itself:  Can the Fourteenth Amendment Save the Republic?

This scenario could go before SCOTUS and if it does I have zero faith in their ability to separate good of the country from their personal political leanings.

After all they are trying to re-wrote the first and second amendments what makes us think they will not do so for the 14th?

This is a whole can of manure eating worms waiting to get out.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”