The US Constitution Failed Us

What kind of nation allows the loser of a national election to become president — and then does it again 16 years later? 

What kind of nation retains an electoral process that was originally designed to inflate the influence of slaveholders? 

What kind of nation permits its Congress to write a time bomb into law that periodically forces rival factions into a game of chicken that could wreck the world economy? 

What kind of nation fights a civil war over the question of whether people of African descent are people or property, and then looks the other way when the loser ignores the resolution of that war? 

What kind of nation waits until 1965 to guarantee black people’s right to vote? 

Americans speak of our Constitution as if it were a religious text. 

To label a law “unconstitutional” is not simply to say that it violates some procedural rule or legal technicality, it is to label it fundamentally unAmerican. To do so is to question the values of any lawmaker despicable enough to support such a law, and to suggest that those values are at odds with who we are as a nation. 

But our Constitution has not served us nearly as well as we would have been served by other systems adopted by our peer nations. Nor has it lived up to the expectations of its drafters. 

Now, our country is facing a man of superlative ignorance. A racist. An admitted sexual assaulter of women. A man poised to violate the Constitution the very instant he takes the oath of office. A man who openly encouraged Russia’s efforts to usher him into the White House. A man who owes his election to the underhanded efforts of deep state actors within our nation’s internal police agency. A man who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. And the Constitution has placed this man in the White House. 

The Constitution gave Donald Trump command of the world’s most powerful military and an nuclear arsenal that can eradicate all life on Earth. It let him name a racist as our nation’s top enforcer of its laws. It let him use his office to sell hotel rooms to foreign diplomats. 

The Electoral College has voted. Trump will be our next president. This is what the Constitution hath wrought. 

It did this because our Constitution remains the product of a compromise with moral monsters who believed that human beings could be owned as property. 

It did this because our Constitution offers no guarantee, or even much in the way of likelihood, that the men and women elected to lead the country will share the preferences of the nation as a whole. 

It did this because our Constitution fosters voter ignorance. It did this because our Constitution can be gamed — and was gamed quite successfully by the Republican Party.

Also there's no doubt Trump is a psychopath of the highest order.

So, in closing, fuck the GOP and the monster they gleefully elected to the most powerful office in the land.