Why Critics of the Constitution Should NOT Vote for Kamala Harris
Daniel Lazare argues that the Democratic Party nominee is part of the problem, not part of the solution
Last week, Luke Pickrell addressed the pros and cons of voting for Kamala Harris and came down squarely in the middle. As usual in this stage of the political cycle, he said, the left finds itself torn between two opposite goals, i.e., voting for Democrats “as the lesser of two evils” and not voting for them so as to concentrate all the more fully “on building an independent, often explicitly socialist alternative.”
But “[t]his repetitive back-and-forth misses the point,” he said, since “the left should be discussing the importance of a democratic constitution.”
Luke then went on to list various ways of holding Harris’s feet to the fire despite supporting her against Trump. Leftists can push her to speak out against the Electoral College, to say something about the congressional meatgrinder that makes a mockery of efforts to deal with problems like police violence, to denounce the Senate filibuster, and so on. If only Harris and other Democrats would take on such issues, “they could work towards a democratic constitution and help alleviate the anger and dissatisfaction that have fueled the rise of Trump and the far-right. However, there has been no mention of these topics.”
Quite right. But what Luke should have pointed out is that not only has there been no mention so far, but there is zero likelihood of any mention in the future. The reason is simple. Harris is a product of the constitutional system; she’s done well by it, and she may well become the most powerful person in the world by virtue of its complicated electoral machinery. So, she has no intention of biting the hand that feeds her. After all, this is a woman who, after being elected to the Senate from California in November 2016, never said a word about why her state has the same number of votes as Wyoming even though it has 68 times as many people or why Californians have 75 percent less clout than Wyomingites in presidential elections thanks to the Electoral College. She never said a word about the filibuster until running for president in 2019, at which point she discovered that maybe it should go because it was dooming the Green New Deal to extinction.
But she has even less incentive to speak out now that she’s pulling ahead in the polls. Why change the rules when those same rules are working in your favor? Sure, Harris may criticize the Supreme Court from time to time, if, that is, she thinks it will win her votes. But real reform is out of the question. It’s a distraction from the serious business of running a presidential campaign.
“Whether or not you vote for Harris isn’t the main point,” Luke went on, because “it’s important to keep discussing the need for a democratic constitution” regardless of who wins in the fall. But it is the point because Harris and Trump represent different constitutional viewpoints — viewpoints that are not necessarily better but radically opposed regardless.
Trump’s viewpoint is not hard to figure out. In a nutshell, it’s about authoritarianism and mob rule. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he continues to insist that the 2020 election was stolen and that the January 6 insurrection was justified. He has described the J6 rioters as “warriors” and “victims” and told a campaign rally in June that “all they were doing is protesting a rigged election.” They are thus heroes for standing up to Democrats trying to take freedom away. This means that if Trump decides that another election has been rigged — and, as far as he’s concerned, any election that Democrats win is ipso facto crooked — then he’ll feel justified in sending another mob to impose “justice.” Free elections will become a thing of the past.
Trump also stands for the direct use of the military. As he told a conservative political conference in Dallas in August 2022: “In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order – and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops.”
If crime goes up in some Democratic-controlled city or other, he will feel free to send in troops to patrol the streets, make arrests, and maybe even shoot down supposed malefactors. It’s happened before, most notably during the urban riots of the 1960s when the National Guard killed black people by the dozens, and it could well happen again on a new and expanded scale. With Trump also vowing to carry out the “largest deportation program in American history,” the use of troops to round up millions of illegal immigrants is even more explosive. This is what military dictatorship looks like, and it could well be coming to a neighborhood near you.
It’s pointless arguing over whether all this is constitutional or not since it’s the product of decades of accelerating constitutional decay. Rather than violating the Constitution, Trump, in a backhanded way, is fulfilling it.
But what about Harris — what does she stand for? The answer is stasis, complacency, and a continuation of the structural deep freeze that is undermining democracy at every turn. She also stands for a return of the liberal myth about a progressive Constitution that has guided us safely in the past and will continue guiding us for centuries to come if we hold true to its precepts. Indeed, if Harris succeeds in vanquishing the evil monster of Trumpism, the myth will return with a vengeance. There will be dancing in the streets and hosannas to the Founding Fathers that will shake the rafters. Faith will triumph, and “the beautiful, exquisite, brilliant genius of the Constitution,” as Nancy Pelosi likes to put it, will be restored.
The upshot will be a retreat into a liberal fantasyland that will leave critics of the Constitution more marginalized than ever. The dream world can’t last, of course, since constitutional breakdown will continue to intensify whether Harris likes it or not. But Americans will be even less prepared to deal with it than they were previously.
Indeed, there are indications that constitutional reality is already re-asserting itself with the election still some 10 or 11 weeks away. Harris’s efforts to come up with something resembling a political program have so far been a flop. Her attempts to blame rising food costs on corporate “price gouging” have led to an abundance of head-scratching over whether she really means to impose price controls, how she’ll enforce them, or why she is bringing them up now that inflation is beginning to fade. Her proposal to build three million new homes is raising eyebrows since the real problem is a welter of nimby-style regulations that have slowed construction to a crawl, yet which the White House is powerless to change since the Constitution leaves housing, zoning, and other such matters almost entirely in the hands of the states. As even the indefatigable pro-Democratic warrior Paul Krugman notes: “Unfortunately, these barriers to construction exist mainly at the state and local level and are out of reach of any politically plausible federal policy.”
Even the housing crisis turns out to have a major constitutional component. The breakdown is so all-consuming, in other words, that it is impossible to address any one part without addressing the constitutional crisis as a whole. But since this is the last thing Harris wants to do, such problems can only continue.
To be sure, Harris may succeed in fooling enough people enough of the time to prevail in November. But reality will eventually catch up. Instead of giving leftists the go-ahead to vote for Harris, this blog should point out why doing so is constitutionally retrograde and why her entire effort runs counter to the cause of democracy. Kamala is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It’s important to keep that straight.