Obama and The Breakfast Club
A title I never thought we'd use. By Luke Pickrell
The Breakfast Club is a popular radio and television show hosted by Charlamagne tha God, DJ Envy, and Jess Hilarious. In 2020, the program reached some eight million people each month, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and was called “appointment listening every day for people of color” by Talkers magazine. That same year, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared on the show and made his infamous “you ain’t black” comment.
The Constitution was not on my radar four years ago, but The Breakfast Club and Barack Obama were thinking about it. Obama appeared on the show in November 2020, and everyone involved had something to say about the Framers’ creation. The interview has drawn nearly 2 million views and over 35,000 likes on YouTube. The discussion didn’t necessarily provoke any novel points about the Constitution or American “democracy.” What’s most interesting is who spoke and what they got right and wrong.
A selection of paraphrased statements from the interview:
Obama (34:20): If we want to bring about systemic change, there are a whole bunch of different pressure points that we have to apply. It's not just the presidency… I have a lot of power as president. I'm the most powerful person as president. But I still need Congress. I still need to ensure that we have a majority in the House of Representatives because if I don't, I can't get a single law passed. If I want to change something about criminal justice reform, it turns out that the federal government isn't actually in charge of most criminal laws. Most criminal laws are made at the state level and determined by state prosecutors. Most police departments in the federal government have nothing to do with what's determined by the mayor of that city. Whether they're prosecuted when they do something wrong is up to the state's attorney or district attorney in that area.
Charlamagne (41:40): … how different would the Democratic Party strategy be if we lived in a one-man, one-vote society with no Electoral College?
Obama: I think that would help… let's take a simple example like the Senate. Wyoming has about half a million people and has the same number of senators as California, with 33 million people [chuckles from one of the hosts]. That means the Senate is hugely skewed towards some of these lower populations, more rural, much whiter states than the big coastal states. That’s a big difference in terms of getting stuff done. The bottom line is that our democracy is imperfect. Changing that is going to take a lot of effort… if we control the Senate, then it is at least theoretically possible to pass a voting rights bill that stops some of this voter suppression and intimidation that you're still seeing around the country… but getting to the Electoral College or getting to the way the Senate is skewed — that would also require us to potentially admit Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. It would mean having states change how they do their electoral counts…
Charlamagne: I think the Constitution is outdated.
Obama: There is a way to change it: amending the Constitution. The problem is that to do that, we have to increase awareness and activism. There's a mechanism to amend the Constitution, but you have to get everybody involved and focused. If we really want to change stuff, you must know about the Senate filibuster. This is a rule that the Senate adopted that says you have to have 60 votes to pass legislation; you have to have a supermajority. Well, that even more empowers those little states because now they don't need 50 votes; they just need 41 to block anything from getting through the Senate. That's what happened to me in my first two years. I had to get 60 votes on everything. This meant that the number of senators representing 25 percent of the country had veto power over anything we wanted to try to get done. But most people don't know that…
Charlamagne: I thought [the filibuster] was when people talk for a long time.
Jess: I learned about it in the book
Obama: [The filibuster] was most used to block civil rights legislation and anti-lynching legislation, which is still operating. We have to know how that stuff works for us if we really want the kind of changes you're talking about where we are taking away some of these barriers to everybody having their voice heard in the government.
Obama (51:20): I will come on this show whenever I hear folks say voting doesn't matter. Yeah, voting is not like winning the lottery. You don't vote, and then suddenly everything is great. Voting is more like washing your car or ironing your clothes. It's part of the thing you do to make stuff work. It's part of your responsibility — all of our responsibility — to ensure that we don't see chaos of the sort we've seen [during Trump’s presidency].
A few thoughts.
Obama understands how the Constitution works. Our system of checks and balances makes it uniquely challenging to pass legislation and realize political projects. Federalism allows states and their police departments to do whatever they want. As Aziz Rana understands, federalism and gridlock aren’t value-neutral. Obama is correct: Our system of checks and balances allows lower populations, more rural, and much whiter states to dictate federal policy. Of course, Obama would never phrase the problem in precisely this way. For him and everyone else who buys into the constitutional creed, checks and balances are an untouchable — nay, sacred — part of American politics.
Obama contradicts himself. On the one hand, the Constitution is fundamentally sound and worthy of protection. No president, former or current, is ever going to say otherwise. On the other hand, the U.S. has an “imperfect” democracy in which legislation can’t get passed because of a laughably designed Senate that allows not 25 percent of the population to block legislation (as Obama states) but a staggering 10.7 percent. This inequality grows as population centers shift. As Daniel Lazare explains, before the Civil War, only a quarter or a third of the population was needed to gain control of the upper chamber. By the time Obama spoke to Charlamagne, as little as 16.9 percent of the population could elect a Senate majority.
Later, Obama said it was “all of our responsibility” to stop Trump by voting for Biden. Wait, didn’t he just spend ten minutes explaining how the political system works to empower a minority of voters? Didn’t Obama criticize the Electoral College in 2016? Whether it’s calculated prudence or a subconscious force of habit (I say the former), Obama easily slides back into the schtick of America as a fundamentally democratic country. In some ways, he must. He knows that touching the Constitution’s structural provisions, like the Electoral College and the Senate, pulls too many strings. The whole political edifice would start to unravel. Charlamagne’s astute comment — what if we lived in a one-man, one-vote society with no Electoral College — is too dangerous to seriously address, and none of the hosts seem to notice when Obama tactfully puts it aside.
Obama says the Constitution can solve its own problems through Article V if enough people get involved. Yikes, that “if” is carrying a heavy load. Of course, anything is theoretically possible “if only” X, Y, or Z happens. But the Constitution is designed to impede change, let alone significant change. The last Amendment was ratified in 1992 — a staggering 193 years after its introduction. The 27th Amendment does essentially nothing important, meaning that the last meaningful Amendment (which still didn’t touch the Constitution’s structural provisions) happened over 50 years ago. Article V is the elephant in the room: Everyone knows it’s an immovable obstacle, but very few people dare say the truth out loud. Everything described in the previous point makes the amendment process increasingly onerous.
Obama is correct: Education is crucial if we want to remove the “barriers to everybody having their voice heard in the government.” I have no complaints! Heck, Obama’s book taught Charlamagne and Jess about the filibuster. The question, however, is where that education leads. For Obama and legal scholars like Yuval Levin, everything comes back around to the Constitution. The document has its problems but also holds the solution in Article V. What’s needed is education that undermines the myth that the Constitution can solve our problems. Of course, that’s not the kind of education Obama has in mind.
Since 2020, Charlamagne hasn’t stopped discussing issues that eventually run into the Constitution. Obama has stopped. These days, he and his fellow Democrats are more interested in making penis jokes. That’s predictable.