The Democracy Diet

I would eat pepperoni pizza every day if it would not make me grotesquely fat and kill me within a year. But it would kill me so I limit pepperoni pizza to once a week. My wife would have a similar problem with chocolate if she wouldn’t have to pay a price similar to my pizza eating. Democracy is like that. Democracy is as essential to the continuance of our republic, as pizza is to me. But the Framers of the US Constitution put America on a democracy diet, just like I limit my pizza consumption to prolong my life, because too much democracy is as bad as too little.

The Framers created a government composed of three distinct branches that were each empowered in different ways such that each separate branch balanced and checked the power of the other branches. Some people believe there is a fourth branch of government, the administrative state, that contends for power with the other constitutional branches of government. President Woodrow Wilson was a strong proponent of the progressive concept of an administration composed of experts and academics in various fields as compared to political appointees nominated on the basis of patronage, known as the spoils system. As the modern world increases in complexity, government has become ever more dependent on these experts.

One could say that the administrative state is usurping much of the power of the legislative branch, but to a large extent this power transfer has been prompted by the inaction of a gridlocked Congress that cannot even pass a budget. The administrative state is naturally accustomed to the use of government power in the interest of what the administrators call the common good. But in many cases the administrative state, which is technically a part of the executive branch, has overstepped its authority by implementing rules and regulations that are, in effect, legislation. Further, because the administrative state (which former President Donald Trump calls “the Swamp”) is composed of people who believe in big government, and who are hard to control or fire, they tend to prefer left wing solutions to problems.

But the checks and balances created by the Framers are bulwarks and protections against the encroachment of legislative authority by departments (sometimes perhaps rogue departments) of the executive branch. It is a function of the judicial branch (and especially the Supreme Court) to put a brake on this usurpation of governmental power. A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal (All the President’s Legal Defeats, September 12, 2024) highlighted many cases where the administrative state, and in some cases, the President himself, have overstepped their authority and where the courts have blocked these unconstitutional and illegal acts. The president may want to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt, but only Congress has the power of the purse.

This has caused much gnashing of teeth among our progressive friends. There are so many things that they want to do for the common good of the American people, it drives them mad that they are blocked by what they believe is a politically-motivated, far-right Supreme Court. But the left-wing progressive ideas of the common good are apparently not shared by the American people as they are unable to get their ideas approved by Congress. The US Constitution requires a strong consensus in order to make major changes that affect hundreds of millions of people, as pointed out by Yuval Levin in his recent book, American Covenant. The process of changing or amending the Constitution is difficult, but not impossible. It has been changed 27 times. And while we may all agree that the American Congress is broken and ineffectual, that does not mean we should ignore the Constitution and circumvent Congress. The cure for a broken Congress is not to give all legislative power to the Executive branch.

But with an ineffective Congress unable to approve their agenda, the progressive left desperately wants to bring the Supreme Court to heel. They see the Supreme Court as the last hurdle blocking their majoritarianist vision of the future. Although President Joe Biden had demurred from packing the Supreme Court, he now supports a “bold Plan” to reform the court according to Jonathan Turley’s op-ed, The Left’s Assault on the Constitution (September 12, 2024). For her part, presidential candidate Kamala Harris quickly endorsed Mr. Biden’s plan to resolve the “clear crisis of confidence” in the Court due to “decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent” (as if precedent took precedence over the Constitution). Progressive gadflies Sheldon Whitehouse and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also support  what a plethora of progressive academics call a “reimagination of democracy.”

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How will this new reimagined democracy work?

We only have to look next door to Mexico to see what could happen in the United States if our Constitutional protections are overwhelmed by “democracy.” Mexican President Lopez Obrador’s anointed successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won’t take office until October but the new legislature has already been seated, giving Lopez Obrador the opportunity to make enormous constitutional changes even while being a lame duck president. He has about twenty constitutional changes he wants the legislature controlled by his political party, Morena, to make. These include changing the number of seats in the legislature to give his party a permanent advantage over the opposition and politicizing the judicial system by forcing judges, including the Supreme Court, to run for election. His goal is to make Morena into the new Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI that maintained one-party control over Mexico for over 70 years. 

AMLO (as Lopez Obrador is known) along with Lula (as Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is known) have come out in support of Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro’s (no nickname) stolen election. Maduro was the vice-president and successor of Hugo Chavez, a golpista (coup plotter) who was imprisoned for a violent attempt to overthrow an elected government in Venezuela, who (like his fellow putschist Adolf Hitler) went on to be elected president (or in Hitler’s case chancellor). The first order of business for the newly elected Chavez was to reimagine the democracy that elected him and to reform the Supreme Court . Much the same could be said of Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. The wildly popular Nayib Bukele was just reelected president of El Salvador even though that country’s constitution prohibits reelection (on a side note, I just read in today’s news report from El Salvador that the government is blocking access for reporters, critics and citizens opposed to the government).

There is no problem in very popular political leaders like AMLO, Lula, Nayib or Hugo reimagining democracy. The problem comes years later when people tire of that leader or his successor, when promised benefits evaporate, and when people start fleeing to other countries. Then reimagined democracy begins to look a lot like dictatorship. Venezuelans are now wishing that Hugo Chavez had not reimagined democracy. They wish that the Supreme Court was an independent check to government power. They wish there was an opposition party. They wish that bloody revolution was not their only alternative.

Without a diet, reimagined majoritarian democracy becomes a grotesque monster. Think about that before you vote for someone who thinks their reimagined democracy is better than the one the Framers created almost 250 years ago.