Harvard legal scholars debate the state of the U.S. constitution

Summary

It has been a rocky year for the U.S. Constitution. Eight months into a fast-moving presidency that legal scholars keep describing as a “constitutional stress test,” the Trump administration’s sweeping assertions of executive power have prompted an unprecedented number of legal challenges, including from Harvard, accusing it of violating the Constitution. This April, one national poll found that two-thirds of Americans were concerned about a constitutional crisis. Yet the nation’s founding document still rates as high as ever, with about nine out of ten people expressing a favorable view.Should they, though? Is the Constitution really up to the task of preserving democracy in this moment? Or is it, as the title of a Wednesday evening discussion asked, “broken”? Two constitutional law scholars—Aziz Rana ’00, Ph.D. ’07, and Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman—debated the answer on Boston Common, seated at the foot of The Embrace, the monument to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Co-sponsored by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the event was moderated by Loeb associate professor of the social sciences Brandon Terry.To Rana, a Boston College professor who last year published The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them, the Constitution is, indeed, broken. In fact, he argued, the U.S. constitutional system has “super-charged” the current assault by Trump and his allies on the rights and civil liberties that were expanded during the twentieth century. “There is no way to protect those hard-won achievements—achievements that MLK fought and died for,” Rana said, “without ultimately changing pretty foundational features of the hard-wired components of our constitutional system.”Chief among those hard-wired components, he said, is the Constitution’s focus on states, rather than individual voters, as the basic “representational unit.” That arrangement “shapes all the elements of our electoral and l...