U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), best known for calling President Trump a m*****f***** and cozying up to anti-Semites, recently stated the following “The most dangerous threat to our democracy is President Trump’s actions since taking the oath of office.”
Forget the fact that our nation was created as a republic; this is a very serious charge and can be equated with saying that President Trump is a danger to our Constitution. Rep. Tlaib is not the only person saying this.
Many high ranking Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, have made this sort of statement. However, I can’t help but think that, when Clinton and Tliab talk about dangers to the Constitution, they should think about some of the positions their own party has recently taken.
First you see a growing attack on the Electoral College. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a 2020 Presidential candidate, has called for the abolition of the Electoral College during a recent CNN town hall in Mississippi saying, “My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can do that is that we can have national voting and that means getting rid of the Electoral College.”
Fellow Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), also a 2020 Presidential candidate, has said that she is “open to the discussion” about doing away with the Electoral College. Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), one of the Democratic Presidential frontrunners, tweeted after the 2016 election, “We need to change the Electoral College.”
When asked about getting rid of the Electoral College, former U.S. Representative, 2020 presidential candidate, and skateboarder extraordinaire Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) said, “I think there’s a lot of wisdom to that and it’s something we talked about during the last senate race in Texas.” This list of quotes is from some of the top Democrats running for President and they all seem to advocate for the elimination of the Electoral College.
The problem is that these quotes show a basic misunderstanding of the purpose of the Electoral College. Our Founders included the Electoral College in the Constitution for the express purpose of giving smaller states a greater voice in the election of the President. The Founding Fathers understood that if the President was elected by popular vote, Americans in less populated states (i.e. New Hampshire, Maine, Wyoming, Delaware, etc.) would be left behind as politicians would focus on the states with large populations. (i.e. Texas, California, New York, Florida, etc.) The left seems willing to attack an important part of our Constitution just because they lost the Presidency in 2016 and 2000. Changing the Constitution just so you have a better chance at winning doesn’t sound like a party that is that concerned with protecting our Constitution.
Many on the left have also embraced the idea of court packing. (The idea of adding more Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court to further a party’s political advantage) Politico has reported that Senators Kamala Harris (D-CA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have “not ruled out expanding the Supreme Court if elected President.” These are all 2020 presidential candidates and they are not alone in the Democratic arena in calling for an expansion of the Supreme Court. Now there is no specific number of Supreme Court Justices specified by the Constitution but there is no doubt that Democrats are doing this for purely partisan political purposes. How do I know? If Donald Trump announced tomorrow that he would add more Supreme Court Justices, Democrats would lose their minds.
More importantly, this strategy uncovers a basic idea from the left that if their agenda cannot prevail through legislation, they’ll just cram it through using judicial fiat. They have done this with both abortion and gay marriage and this method is a complete desecration of the Constitution’s original intent of the courts. Simply put, the court’s job, as outlined in the Constitution, was to interpret the laws passed by Congress through the lens of the Constitution. Not creating laws that your party can’t get through the legislature. But the left has again decided to attack the Constitution and how it is supposed to work for their own political gain.
These are just two dangers posed to our Constitution by the left, and these are not even dealing with the 1st and 2nd Amendment, which we’ll have to save for another time. I think that the issues we just looked at are a little more threatening to Constitutional norms than Donald Trump’s tweeting something stupid about the press. But where is Rep. Tlaib on these issues? Could it be that she doesn’t really care about following the Constitution and simply wants to use it to bash President Trump? It certainly looks that way, since she doesn’t seem to mind members of her own party attacking Constitutional norms.
Isaac Hadam is an 18 year old who writes and speaks about the U.S. Constitution. He is the Vice-President of the Constitutional Awareness Pact, has written for the Conway Daily Sun, and is a contributing writer to the Weirs Times. For more info please visit www.constitutionalawarenesspact.webs.com.
