Jill Lepore bewails the inability of today’s political process to make amendments to the Constitution.
In my view, this paralysis was part of the design of the Constitution, which was not as dedicated to the promise of democracy that most Americans hold dear.
As the Supreme Court aggressively attempts to dismantle progressivism dating to the New Deal, it is the anti-democratic elements of the Constitution that they are relying upon. The arguments of originalism are perverse because its intention is perverse. It is nothing more than a rhetorical vehicle that is endlessly malleable, and that allows for specious arguments to be presented with the thinnest of a veneer, designed to support a foregone, ideologically-based conclusion.
That conclusion invariably serves the interests of billionaires and the Christian nationalists, gun-owners, anti-government extremists and racists they have skillfully recruited on the basis of fear and resentment politics. Thus the distortion favoring minority interests that was enshrined in the Constitution (Electoral College, granting of disproportionate senatorial power to low-population states, etc.) is serving its “originalist” purpose.
Gary M. Stewart, Laguna Beach
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