Democracy Brief: What a Second Trump Term Means for the Constitution
It means three things
It is clear to me, after several years of writing American Commonwealth, that readers prioritize the perpetuation of a peaceful constitutional democracy above all the other social and political issues that so intimately touch our lives and the futures of our children.
My view is that our Constitution and the democratic republic it inaugurated in 1789 constitute the grand infrastructure upon which all else hangs.
For this reason, in addition to my own writing, I intend to bring you briefs on important articles by other writers on this foremost issue in our lives:
How to perpetuate a peaceful American democracy
Today, in close connection with my essay from the day before the election, I provide you with a synopsis of “What a Second Trump Term Means for the Constitution,” the lead article in Time this morning.
In the essay Kermit Roosevelt III, professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that in projecting the possible impacts of a second Trump term on the Constitution, we should look at three separate areas of potential harm:
Constitutional norms
Judicial decisions
The letter of the Constitution—that is, clear constitutional provisions
Roosevelt concludes that constitutional norms will not hold, as the first Trump administration has shown, and further that “judge-made constitutional law can stand against the executive branch—but only if the judges want it to. What judges give, they can take away.”
As examples of rights taken away under the first Trump administration, he cites the right to abortion and the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action.
Therefore, Roosevelt concludes, “It would not be surprising if the Supreme Court whittled free speech down to allow the government to silence some critics.”
He continues, “This, then, leaves the clear text of the Constitution for us to consider . . . More specifically, the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms, is likely to hold. And no attempt to amend the Constitution to eliminate it is likely to succeed.”
In this case, the extraordinary hurdles to amending the Constitution will serve as a firm barrier to Trump’s perpetuation of power, even though he will surely further erode our political norms and his judicial appointees will possibly put American rights and freedoms at risk.