To the Republic for Which It Stands
By Caroline Downey
For all the incessant invocations of our democracy and the urgency to save it, the word is curiously absent from our country’s founding documents. While America’s architects intentionally included the word “republic” in our Constitution, they only referenced “democracy” to warn against it. As the founders breathed life into the American experiment, they remembered history’s cautionary tales, like ancient Athens’ tumultuous experience at the hands of mob rule under pure democracy. Applying these lessons, our forefathers endowed us with a robust republican infrastructure, featuring bulwarks such as the electoral college, a representative bicameral legislature, and lifetime judicial appointments, that could resist the tyranny of the majority and temper populist passion.
But today, the modern Left wants to rob us of this inheritance. In the name of “equality,” progressives co-opt and erode our Constitutional bedrock to advance their political agenda. Packing the Supreme Court and throwing out the Electoral College, once-fringe ideas, now represent the Democratic mainstream. During the recent Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, Democratic ticket nominees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both refused to reveal their plans for these items in the event of a blue sweep. But Biden’s admission from the first evening, “I am the Democratic Party,” speaks volumes. It confirms our deepest suspicions that chief executive Biden will be a puppet for the far-Left. If a Biden-Harris administration takes the White House, the battle for America’s institutions begins. America depends on a President who will defend them. That President is Donald J. Trump.
The late justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasn’t even laid to her final resting place before the Democrats erupted into hysteria over the future of the Supreme Court. Immediately following the announcement of Amy Coney Barret’s nomination, the Democrats began plotting to subvert SCOTUS. They’ve since advocated for term limits for justices, violating Alexander Hamilton’s permanent tenure policy that he believed essential to the judiciary’s independence from the other government branches. The founders’ prescribed a lifetime commitment for justices in order to insulate them from the political fray. Sequestering the high court from party politics was not an oversight but the framers’ deliberate design.
Concerned that making the judiciary an elected pedestal would compromise its ability to practice impartiality as chief arbiter of the law, the framers made SCOTUS by appointment. Indeed, SCOTUS was supposed to be undemocratic and disconnected from public impulses, yet liberals talk about it like it’s an elected legislature and vehicle for dramatic social change. It was never meant to “legislate from the bench” or engage in the kind of politically charged judicial activism that manifested during Roe v. Wade (national legalization of abortion) and Obergefell v. Hodges (national legalization of same-sex marriage).
But while the judiciary’s integrity has already been damaged, an even more vicious assault awaits it this election cycle. Now that an originalist bench threatens to obstruct their radical policies, the Democrats are again courting the idea of court-packing. FDR set a precedent in 1937 when he tried to expand the bench to create an ideological majority sympathetic to his New Deal program. Considering SCOTUS has managed just fine with nine justices since 1869, Democrats are pitching court-packing as an obvious back-door political strategy to win favorable rulings for their unpalatable programs. It’s an egregious power grab that compromises the integrity of the judiciary. Since Biden won’t promise not to pack the court, Trump’s re-election is the only hope to stop the Democrats’ schemes.
While the founders agreed that our government derives its authority from “the consent of the governed,” they didn’t always mean directly. Perhaps no institution better embodies James Madison’s vision of American republicanism better than the electoral college. Possibly no institution receives more vitriol from the Left. As articulated by Publius in The Federalist Papers, the electoral college combines a representative democracy with federalism. Each state appoints enlightened delegates equal to the number of that state’s senators and representatives. These electors, comprising an assembly, ultimately choose the President. When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he was the fifth candidate in U.S. history to do so without winning the popular vote. We heard the familiar refrain, “The Electoral College is undemocratic.” Democrats criticized that it fails the principle of “one man, one vote” (another phrase frequently conjured but mysteriously missing from the Constitution). Again, my answer is an enthusiastic “Yes, it is undemocratic…on purpose!”
Not at all defective or antiquated, the electoral college is imbued with the wisdom of thinkers who anticipated our challenges hundreds of years in advance. The founders created the Electoral College as a barrier against what James Madison called a tyranny of the “overbearing majority.” With a Biden victory, the Democrats will pull the president’s strings to put the Electoral College on trial. Many Democrats support the Electoral College’s abolition and replacement by popular rule. Under a popular vote system, largely populated states and urban centers will seize every election. In other words, in a nation of fifty United States, New York, and California metropolises will determine every general election outcome. Candidates will have no incentive to canvass or invest in diverse geographical areas or states like Wyoming, Vermont, or Kansas. We recall how embarrassingly little time Hillary Clinton spent visiting decisive Rust Belt states Wisconsin and Michigan on the 2016 campaign trail (and how it backfired bigtime). If the Electoral College is ditched for popular rule, this neglect will be magnified on a multi-regional scale. Eliminating the Electoral College is an affront to federalism and the great states that pre-date both the Constitution and the American revolution. Realizing James Madison’s fears, a popular vote system will favor the interests of the “many” at the expense of the “few,” abandoning and ignoring the contributions of the agricultural breadbasket, domestic industries in rural Appalachia, and the people of the American heartland.
It’s clear that political personalities are not on the 2020 ballot— our institutions are. As the Democrats celebrate the dismantlement of the Constitution and our republican architecture, I can only comment that they display a woeful ignorance of history. This November, we risk squandering the constitutional legacy entrusted to us by not mobilizing for President Donald Trump. America has weathered many storms and boasted a remarkably long lifespan thanks to the sturdy framework and fail safes that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, etc. established. But no nation endures forever. Since the Democrats have forsaken our institutions, conservatives must be a mouthpiece for the founders. In this general election, we vote for the survival of our republic.
Photo via Pinterest
