The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy.

• Author: Cutler, Lloyd N.

Daniel Lazare describes himself as a freelance journalist who writes about race, drugs, and urban policy. He has no training or reputation as a constitutional scholar. But he has plainly read a great deal about the framing of our constitution, the writings and thinking of the Enlightenment, and the commentaries on die Constitution from de Tocqueville and Jeremy Bentham to Woodrow Wilson and Charles Beard.

Unfortunately, the conclusions he distills from this research strike me as being as wrong-headed as they possibly can. He views the checks and balances of the constitutional system as freezing the nation's ability to deal decisively with problems from slavery in the first half of the 19th century to the drug culture, urban decay, and environmental damage in the second half of the 20th. In short, he blames the Constitution for every imaginable modem ill.

Lazare offers this doomsday scenario: In 2020, California threatens to secede from the union unless its representation in the Senate is increased to be in proportion with its population. In response, the House of Representatives passes a resolution abolishing the Senate, wins popular approval of this decision by a national referendum, and thereafter runs the country by its own majority rule. Lazare approves of this course. It would be justified, he argues, by the principle that "we, the people," having proclaimed the Constitution in the first place, can amend or abolish it through our elected representatives in the House, without following the amendment procedure specified in Article V. What the president, the courts, the armed forces, and the press would be doing while all this is going on, Lazare does not explain.

One cannot help but note the similarity of Lazare's preference for majoritarian absolutism with that of Pat Buchanan. Buchanan would have Congress set aside Supreme Court constitutional decisions, though even he would probably acknowledge the need to amend the Constitution to do this. Not so Lazare, who would have the House alone seize all the government's powers by coup d'etat.

Lazare correctly points out that we have had at least one such coup before, namely when the Philadelphia Convention convened to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Under those Articles, it would have required unanimous approval of all 13 states for any such amendment to be adopted. Instead, the Constitution was drafted from scratch; the framers pronounced by fiat that it would take...