Republicans haven’t flouted the constitutional order. They’ve made use of it. Things haven’t gone wrong because a system that was humming along fine until recently has been damaged in some fundamental way. The system is humming along essentially as it always has with increasingly dire results. The crisis is not that the American constitutional system is broken but that the American constitutional system is working—perhaps not as the Framers intended but, as a legal and administrative matter, mostly as it was designed to. . .
One alternative idea gaining currency among progressives is
jurisdiction-stripping—Article III of the Constitution gives Congress the power to limit the Supreme Court’s authority to hear certain cases. In 1982, John Roberts, then at the Department of Justice, actually
wrote memos defending the practice. And as Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project argued recently, policymakers could conceivably attempt to ignore the Supreme Court entirely. “All the president has to do is assert that Supreme Court rulings about constitutionality are merely advisory and non-binding, that [Marbury vs. Madison] was wrongly decided, and that the constitutional document says absolutely nothing about the Supreme Court having this power,” he
wrote. “You don’t need a constitutional amendment. You don’t need to pass a law. And you don’t need to appoint any judges. This is a completely reasonable position that also reflects the kind of power top courts have in other countries.”
A group of Vanderbilt University professors recently claimed that the U.S. Constitution was “designed to perpetuate white supremacy,” penalizing any student who disagreed on a class quiz.
The quiz, required in PSCI 1150: U. S. ELECTIONS 2020, asked students to answer true or false to the question, “Was the Constitution designed to perpetuate white supremacy and protect the institution of slavery?” One student answered “false,” and the question was marked wrong.