Constitutional Convention Conundrum

Lack of common ground, as well as either side believing the other is acting in good faith means no constitutional convention is likely. [Link]

It is one thing to reach policy compromises even over deeply divisive policy issues such as the debt ceiling.  Constitutional compromise is another matter, and it is easy to predict that the Con-Con-Con effort will make little progress for an elusively simple reason: the basic condition that made the compromises of the 1787 convention possible do not exist today.  The Framers of 1787, and, significantly, their critics who became the Anti-Federalists, shared a general agreement about first principles (with one important exception which I’ll come to in due course), which made institutional compromise possible.  The Framers were all believers in the creed of individual natural rights as expressed in the prologue to the Declaration of Independence, and moreover believed that limiting government required anti-majoritarian institutions such as the Senate, separation of powers, the Electoral College, and federalism, among other things.  The modern left believes in none of these things, and every agenda of constitutional reform from the left calls for abolishing or weakening all of them.  (See, for just one example, Larry Sabato’s really bad book on the subject, and Sabato is far from being a hard leftist.)  The left would like to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College, just for starters.  Deep-dish thinkers like Cass Sunstein have argued for making the judiciary more powerful, precisely because it is more immune to popular political accountability.

For the Framers in 1787, most of their arguments were over how to limit government power and secure individual liberty most effectively, which meant they were arguing over small differences.  You might almost say that the Philadelphia convention was a group of rightists arguing with themselves.  Today’s left, starting at least as far back as Woodrow Wilson, who dismissed the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and attacked the principle of the separation of powers, wants to remove as many limitations on government power as possible.  As such the Con-Con-Con exercise has little hope of reaching a principled compromise over constitutional reform, and even if a suite of reforms might get the necessary ratification of three-fourths of the states, it is likely the reforms would make our political divisions worse.