Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:
The United States Constitution is in trouble. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Outraged critics denounced him for threatening a document that is supposed to be “sacrosanct.” By announcing his desire to throw off constitutional constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, Trump was making his authoritarian inclinations abundantly clear.
It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution. But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.
After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed. The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”
More here.
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