S1 E12 Our Undemocratic Constitution with Sanford Levinson

05/16/22 • 63 min

Peaceful Political Revolution in America

Any serious discussion about a peaceful political revolution in America would be incomplete if it did not include a conversation with today's guest. Sandford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law.

Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is currently Professor of Government at the University of Texas in Austin. Levinson is the author of over 400 articles and book reviews as well as six books, including, Our Undemocratic Constitution; Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance; and co-author of the graphic novel along with Cynthia Levinson of, Fault Lines in the Constitution. He has edited or co-edited several leading constitutional law casebooks, including; Processes of Constitutional Decision making; Responding to Imperfection; Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies; Legal Canons; and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution.

Levinson has taught law at Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, New York University, Boston University, as well as the Central European University in Budapest, Panthéon-Assas University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, London, Auckland, and Melbourne. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has argued that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution limits the government's authority to regulate private gun ownership. Levinson has called for term limits for Supreme Court justices along with a growing list of scholars across the ideological spectrum. He is also a vocal critic of the unitary executive and excessive presidential power. In the magazine Dissent, he argued that "constitutional dictators have become the American norm." He wrote an essay titled "The Decider Can Become a Dictator" in which he criticized a system which allows presidents to make dictatorial decisions of great consequence without providing ways to discipline those who display bad judgment.

Levinson has criticized the Constitution for what he considers to be its numerous failings, including an inability to remove the President despite a lack of confidence by lawmakers and the public, the President's veto power as being "extraordinarily undemocratic", the difficulty of enacting Constitutional amendments through Article 5, and a lack of more representation in the Senate for highly populated states such as California. He has often called for a Second Constitutional Convention and the "wholesale revision of our nation's founding document."

Levinson participates in a blog called Balkinization which focuses on constitutional, First Amendment, and other civil liberties issues, as well as a blog, called Our Undemocratic Constitution. With Jeffrey K. Tulis, he is co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought and also of a new series, Constitutional Thinking at the University Press of Kansas. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2010.

I began my quest for a genuine solution to the political dysfunction in the United States over ten years ago when I first opened the cover of his book, Framed. It has proven itself to be not only relevant today but required reading for anyone interested in addressing the failures and shortcomings of our uniquely undemocratic American Political system.

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S1 E11 The Icelandic Constitutional Assembly with Tom Ginsburg

Welcome back to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast.

When you look around the world at different constitutions, and how political systems are formed, you quickly realize that they are all quite different, even amongst the democratic nations. Every democratic country does democracy a little differently, and the results vary just as much.

The conditions which lead to a new constitution can be as unpredictable as the events that follow. Constitution building is risky and complicated, which is why it is so hard to do and so rarely achieved. When conditions are right, however, citizens can make significant and meaningful improvements to their form of government. That constitutional moment came to Iceland in 2008, and it has yet to be resolved.

The Icelandic people will have to figure it out, in part because, in Iceland, it is the constituted powers that make that decision, not the constituent powers. In Iceland, it remains the responsibility of the government to adopt any new constitution, not the people.

This is not the case in America. In America, that power, called sovereignty, rests with the people. With you and I. That is the truly radical and democratic principle upon which our nation was formed and it is what makes America a truly exceptional nation. It is the source if you will, of all our freedoms.
For most countries, a constitutional crisis is not just an opportunity to replace an unjust or corrupt political order, it is also an opportunity to reevaluate national and social objectives, to set the country on a new and better path. Hopefully, it is an opportunity to adopt a better and more effective form of representation.
In 1787, it was the realization that the political order was no longer adequate which gave birth to our new and present political system. As Madison put it in Federalist One, "AFTER an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America."

Constitutional moments do not come along every decade, or even every century, yet it is common sense that as societies evolve so must their political systems. Like everything else in life, political and economic systems must continually adapt to new technologies and new challenges. If they do not, they may become vulnerable to corruption and gradually become ineffective and irrelevant.

It is beneficial for a nation to refresh its understanding of itself from time to time. The citizens must find agreement in their principles, and their objectives as a nation or divisions become rather permanent. They must consider the issues confronting them as a nation and when necessary, devise better ways of addressing the threats they face.

It is a momentous occasion for any country to take a serious and long hard look at itself. To conceptualize a better process through which the vast majority of the citizens might be governed in a more just and equitable way is our most sacred duty as citizens. When we fail to do this, we fail to live up to the expectations of the very people who gave us this nation.

Constitutions can be complex documents, but happily, there has been a lot of research and development in the field of democracy since our second constitution was created 230+ years ago. Today we can all look around the globe and see multiple examples of democracies, and that was not the case in 1787.

The United States was the first nation to place sovereignty in the hands of the people, and although you may believe, as I do, that the framers did a relatively bad job of getting a true democracy up and running, the responsibility to improve our constitution was never taken away from we the people. Our most

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S1 E13 Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy with William Howell

William Howell is the Sydney Stein Professor in American Politics at the University of Chicago, where he holds appointments in the Harris School, Department of Political Science, and College. Currently, he is the chair of the Department of Political Science, director of the Center for Effective Government, and co-host of Not Another Politics Podcast. William has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on separation of powers issues, the origins of political authority, and the normative foundations of executive power.

William’s most recent book (with Terry Moe) is Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. He also is the author or co-author of numerous other books, including: Relic: How the Constitution Undermines Effective Government–And Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (Basic Books, 2016); The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013); Thinking about the Presidency: The Primacy of Power (Princeton University Press, 2013); While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton University Press, 2007); Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton University Press, 2003); The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools (Brookings Institution Press, 2002); and textbooks on the American presidency and American Politics. His research also has appeared in numerous professional journals and edited volumes.

William is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He is the recipient, among other academic awards, of the Legacy Award for enduring research on executive politics, the William Riker award for the best book in political economy, the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the best book on Congress, the Richard Neustadt award for the best book on the American presidency, and the E.E. Schattschneider Award for the best dissertation in American Politics. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Democracy Fund, and the Bradley Foundation. He also has written for a wide variety of media outlets.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, William taught in the government department at Harvard University and the political science department at the University of Wisconsin. In 2000, he received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

William, welcome to the Peaceful Political Revolution in America podcast, it's great to have you on the podcast, how are you doing?

What do you make of the hearing today?