"We're in a Constitutional crisis" ...

Talking heads, pundits and politicians who say this are usually displaying their ignorance of the Constitution. Either that, or they are outright lying. 

Neither is a good thing. 

I’m just surprised they get away with ping-ponging on the value and applicability of our Constitution whenever it suits their specific narrative. 

When the Constitution supports what they like, they support the Constitution. Yet when the same Constitution goes against what they like, it’s suddenly an outdated document.

When someone wins the Presidency via the Electoral College, his or her supporters are big fans of the Electoral College. When their candidate loses through the Electoral College, but wins the popular vote, it’s a stupid system that needs to be replaced with the popular vote alone. When the Supreme Court agrees with them, it’s the final authority. When it doesn’t, it needs to be changed. 

Honestly, you can't have it both ways. The Constitution is what it is, period. If anyone wants to change it, there's a process. Until it's changed, you can't just ignore it.    

I tend to think the framers of the Constitution were brilliant in devising the structure of our government.  They separated powers to create checks and balances, so that no one branch of the government – or person – had unlimited power.  That’s lost on too many people. 

Too many are ignorant of how and why the framers structured our system the way they did.  And especially why they opted for a constitutional republic over a democracy. Too many don’t understand why a balance of power is essential for our republic to function properly, or why the framers protected less populated states from being bulldozed by states with bigger populations.

It was all about preventing consolidation of power. And mob rule.  

Congress was originally divided into a popularly elected House, apportioned by population, and a Senate made up of two Senators from each state elected to six-year terms by their respective state legislatures. This way the House reflected the will of the people every two years, while the Senators represented the interests of their states with every state having equal weight. 

I’ve said this many times: many of the current problems we have in Congress – including the flood of money from special interests – result from 17^th Amendment. Before, Senators were only accountable to their state’s legislature which reflected the will of its own state’s constituents.

Changing this was a disaster.

Now Senators are less accountable to their own state’s constituents, and more to out-of-state special interests and deep-pocketed donors.  Senators no longer actually represent their states; they don’t need to because big money for their campaigns is coming from somewhere else. 

Laws and spending had to originate in the House – because that more closely represented the will of the people – and were subject to approval by the Senate. The Senate could take a longer-term view and, as such, could act as a check on legislation that might be popular at the moment, but also shortsighted. This further prevented states with large populations, and more House members as a result, from riding roughshod over less populated states.

This was the same thought process that created the Electoral College. The Electoral College meant that every individual state in the union mattered, not just the overall popular vote.  A candidate couldn’t simply run up the vote in a few big states to become President – he or she needed to win a variety of states to get enough Electoral College votes. This was brilliant.

Finally, the President was tasked with “faithfully” executing the laws of the United States, not creating laws – which was solely in the wheelhouse of Congress.

The Supreme Court was only to be involved when there were disputes among states, conflicts between rulings by lower Federal courts, or when a law by Congress or a state was challenged on Constitutional grounds.  The Supreme Court was the final arbiter.  The Supreme Court had, and still has, absolutely no authority to create law. 

Because that authority belongs solely to Congress. Not the Court. Not the President.   

Why am I bothering with this basic high-school civics lesson?   

Because it’s not being taught in high school anymore.  Hasn’t been for years. 

As a result, we now have generations of people who have absolutely no idea how our government is supposed to work.  Or why power is dispersed among three co-equal branches, and the limits under the Constitution on each of those branches.  They don’t understand what’s in the Constitution. What led the founders to create it in the first place.  Why the Bill of Rights was so important. And why it’s intentionally so difficult to amend the Constitution.

Some of them are now in Congress.  Even more are in the media. Their collective ignorance of our Constitution is sadly on display every day. What they don’t know is appalling.  And dangerous.  Especially since so many in our voting population blindly look to them for guidance. 

If you don’t understand the Constitution and its history, you can’t appreciate why it’s as important today as it was centuries ago.  It’s the one thing that’s been a relative constant from the early days of our nation. It’s the bedrock upon which everything else has been built.  Certainly, it’s been amended and expanded from time to time, but always in a deliberate way.

Yet the basic structure and concept behind it has remained essentially unchanged. 

The creators of our Constitution wanted to avoid mob rule.  They wanted to create a country based on the rule of law rather than the rule of man.  They wanted to prevent would-be tyrants and demagogues from ever seizing absolute power. They didn’t want too much power concentrated in the Federal government, any single branch of government, or any single person.

Or only in the more populous states.

They gave us a constitutional republic instead of a pure democracy, as a result.  A constitutional republic is a representative form of government guided by a central charter that protects the rights of individuals and individual states against the tyranny of a simple majority. 

Our founders never intended the United States to be a pure democracy, run entirely by the will of the majority. That’s because they knew pure democracies often lead to mob rule.   

And chaos.  That’s what some today – particularly those who want to substitute popular opinion for the rule of law under the Constitution – are proposing, whether they know it or not.