American democracy has been ailing for a long time, since well before Donald Trump rode down his gilded escalator in 2015 to announce his insurgent campaign for the presidency. And as our lead political institutions struggle to adapt to the rolling crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s more urgent than ever to make democratic governance something better than an exercise in rueful lip service. New Republic staff writer Matt Ford gives a comprehensive blueprint for this project in an unflinching assessment of how our Constitution needs to reenvision the core principle of self-government in an age of rampaging plutocracy and diminishing civic participation.

At the heart of a thoroughgoing constitutional reclamation, Ford argues, is the effort to rescue the principle of democratic representation from the distortions of gerrymandering, money-driven electioneering, and acute demographic imbalance. The simple model of proportional representation—which would apportion the House slates in each state in accordance with statewide voting returns—would at once make state delegations more closely aligned with the preferences of voting majorities and loosen the major-party stranglehold on access to ballot lines and electoral office. Reform of Senate representation is a far more forbidding undertaking, Ford concedes, given the notorious—and mounting—advantages the upper chamber grants to geographically dispersed rural white electorates. What’s more, the existing language of the Constitution expressly forbids proportional-style recalibrations of the drastically unrepresentative model of Senate governance. “The framers intended for the Senate to counterbalance the majority’s will,” Ford writes, “and it has exceeded all their expectations.… The world’s greatest deliberative body, as it is now only called in mockery, spends its days under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ignoring legislation from the House and rubber-stamping judicial nominations sent by the White House.”

So perhaps the thing to be done with the Senate, Ford argues, is to dramatically constrain the amount of institutional damage the upper chamber can do. Much as the British Parliament curbed the anti-democratic House of Lords, congressional reformers can focus on rendering the U.S. Senate a body charged mostly with advising the executive and deferring to the broader, more representative powers of the House: “Senators would still give advice and consent to presidential appointments, approve or reject treaties, and serve as jurors for impeachment trials. But they could only vote to delay budget-related legislation for one month and all other legislation for up to one year.”

Unwinding the unchecked powers of a “unitary executive,” meanwhile, is obviously crucial to allowing American democracy to survive and expand in the wake of the Trump White House’s multifront assault on its governing prerogatives. Here again, Ford proposes a systemic reform to diffuse power and deconcentrate authority at the top under a “plural executive,” with a separate balloting model for electing vice presidents and other senior executives. Of course, sensitive Cabinet posts such as the U.S. attorney general and treasury secretary would need to preserve complete independence from presidential caprice, with appointments running the full length of the appointing president’s term. 

The all-but-officially gerrymandered federal judiciary also needs to come in for serious structural reforms, Ford argues. The only way to remedy the long-politicized Supreme Court confirmation mess is to pull the plug on it altogether, he suggests, and usher in an expanded high court that operates more on traditional models of promotion and professional advancement, instead of raw patronage and interest-group litmus tests:

The president and the Senate would retain the existing process to nominate and confirm federal District Court judges and federal appellate judges, as outlined in Article Two of the Constitution. Under this proposal, Supreme Court justices would be instead chosen at random from sitting federal judges within each of the geographic circuit courts of appeal. There are currently 11 circuit courts of appeals, plus one for the District of Columbia. That would produce a court with 12 associate justices. A thirteenth seat would be held by the chief justice, who would be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. 

This all makes for a daunting to-do list—to say nothing of other critical reforms, such as abolishing the filibuster and the Electoral College and reconfiguring the acute imbalance of power among the states. But as Ford notes, the alternative to structural reform of our sclerotic constitutional order is far worse. After all, “If the system were healthy enough to readily adopt these changes, it might not need them,” he writes:

But hope is the point. I would like to live in a country where the candidate who receives the most votes becomes president, where lawmakers are answerable to voters instead of donors or gerrymanders, and where Supreme Court vacancies do not spark existential struggles for power. Until then, it’s vital to remember that our constitutional system doesn’t have to be this way, and that a better one is possible.

Or as Ben Franklin, in the wake of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, is reported to have replied, when asked what sort of government the framers had devised for the new American nation: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

—Chris Lehmann, Editor