Toward a New Constitutional Politics - Aziz Rana - LPE Project

The treatment of the Constitution as scripture is a disabling feature in our law and politics.  Especially because the scripture is limited to the 1787 pre-industrial revolution first draft which sought to guarantee the disproportionate power of the slavers like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, 

No one speaks of the drafters of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments as founders.

- GWC

Toward a New Constitutional Politics - LPE Project

By Aziz Rana [Professor of law and government at Boston College.]

In recent years, the anti-democratic flaws of the U.S. Constitution have become increasingly apparent. Commentators now routinely worry over the system’s exaggerated checks on popular authority: the lopsided grant of power to certain states, an impassable constitutional amendment process, widespread voter disenfranchisement, and of course the dramatic control exercised by a tiny group of lifetime federal judges.

And yet, if you grew up in the United States around the turn of the twenty-first century, the dominant culture was that of almost religious textual devotion. Even Occupy Wall Street was launched on Constitution Day, September 17. One might well have assumed that the American constitutional system stood at the apex of liberal-democratic ideas. Given its manifest flaws, how did Americans come to idolize this document and what have been the political consequences of this reverence?

My new book, The Constitutional Bind, attempts to make sense of this striking tension in our collective life. It argues that the substance and implications of modern constitutional veneration have not been continuous since the founding. They are, instead, a distinctively twentieth century development.