In a Wednesday op-ed for Politico, invoking the media’s obsession with January 6, Brooklyn College political science professor Corey Robin flashed just how little he understood about how and why America’s founders set up the system of government they did. Perhaps the aim was just to destroy that magnificent architecture and replace it with something better.
You know how irked Robin is with our system of government right away just by reading the title: “Republicans Are Moving Rapidly to Cement Minority Rule. Blame the Constitution. Robin begins with this because it’s January 6, week, where liberals are required to obsess over that date. However, Robin uses that only to lead to his Constitution bashing.
As we near the 1 year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, it is becoming increasingly clear that both the right and the center believe the Republican Party presents a new threat to American democracy. Robin began his rant by saying that it was a flawed assessment. He oversells or understates how dangerous we are.
Warning! Warning! Warning!
Two forces drive the Republican initiatives and inertia among the Democrats. The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The Constitution is second, making it more difficult for national majorities to make decisions and easier for local minorities. What happened on Jan. 6 is far less significant than what happened before Jan. 6 — and what has and has not happened since then.
Robin now breaks the taboo not to criticize the Constitution. This opens up the floodgates to heavy-duty Constitution bashing.
Democracies are not only the enemies of the Republican Party. It’s also an enemy to the Constitution. Americans often associate the Constitution and popular freedoms such as free speech or due process. The state power structure of the Constitution is overlooked. It creates enormous barriers to equality representation and majority rule across all three branches.Republicans don’t want to reverse a rich and long-standing history of democratic rules. They’re walking through an open door.
This power is actually broken down because the Constitution republic allows the majority to vote for the subjugation of the minorities. These obstacles are significant because it is vital that the sovereign states have the power to overcome them. The bicameral legislative system ensures that the state legislature is equally represented (Senate), and also the House represents the population divided between the two states.
Robin is criticizing the Constitution while Robin attacks the Founding Fathers. He also blames them for not allowing the tyrannical desires of the majority to rule the streets.
The division of Congress into two houses also reflects the Constitution’s antipathy to equal representation and majority rule. Too many states, Alexander Hamilton complained, are “governed by a single democratic assembly or have a senate constituted entirely upon democratic principles.” In unicameral legislatures, the democratic majority — described by James Madison as those who “labor under all the hardships of life and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings” — has too much power to pursue its “leveling” designs. If the legislature is divided in two, however, with an upper chamber reflecting the interests of the wealthy minority “who are placed above the feelings of indigence,” the majority’s designs will be frustrated.
This column could be an indicator of a larger message PoliticoTo its readers, they consider the U.S. Constitution to pose a threat to democracy
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