DEMOCRATS AND THE ILLUSIONS OF A PROMISED LAND.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

THE DEMOCRATS will work to exhaustion to scratch anything they can find from the Mueller Report. Whatever they discover, chances are it will be thin gruel compared to what they anticipated--strong grounds for impeachment and a criminal trial for Pres. Donald Trump and his children. No doubt the Democrats would rather have the 2020 election about a disgraced president facing a criminal trial. That game is over.

Now they must explain and defend one of the most-ambitious agendas in American history. It is a project to change the nature of the U.S. permanently, from one marked largely by free-market competition to a command economy. In order to succeed, they must contend with a major obstacle--our constitutional system. As Katrina vanden Heuvel, former editor of The Nation, wrote in The Washington Post, "From Medicare-for-all to debt-free college to a Green New Deal, the bold ideas that Democrats are proposing will require major structural changes."

These "structural changes" are designed to create a permanent Left/Democratic majority. Most current Democratic presidential candidates seem comfortable with these proposals. First, change the rules and composition of the Senate. Grant statehood to the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other overseas territories, adding substantially more Democratic Senate seats. With a simple Senate majority easily at hand, the filibuster could be eliminated, allowing all legislation to be passed with such a majority.

Second, expand the composition of the Supreme Court to assure an overwhelming liberal majority. The Democrats would go back to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's discredited idea of packing the highest court in the land.

Third, eliminate the Electoral College so that huge Democratic majorities in California, New York, Illinois, and the coastal states would determine the outcome of presidential elections.

Fourth, change the composition of the American electorate, granting illegal immigrants, ex-felons, and 16-year-olds full voting rights--and relax enforcement on our southern border and eliminate ICE to add even more to the Democratic voting lists.

Such proposals would take the country far from the vision of the Founding Fathers, who placed in the Constitution judicial and structural restrictions to avoid the abuses of a majority. They knew that crude majoritarianism opened the door to governance by temporary passions. Such a simplistic understanding of democracy takes little account of the interests...