THE NON-UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

• Author: Chemerinsky, Erwin

I was asked to write on a provocative topic: why is the United States so deeply divided and what can be done about it? I agree with the premise that the United States is deeply politically divided but am hesitant whether I have anything useful to say in response to the questions.

The results of the last two presidential elections paint a picture of a population almost evenly divided between sharply contrasting ideological poles. In November 2020, Joe Biden won 81,283,098 votes, or 51.3% of the votes cast. (1) Donald Trump won 74,222,958 votes, or 46.8% of the votes cast. (2) The 2016 presidential election was even closer, with Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by nearly three million votes. (3) Biden and Trump espoused dramatically different views and values, and they were nominated by political parties that at this time share little common ground on the issues.

Yet even that does not reflect the intensity of the divide in the country. Studies have shown that 38% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans said they would feel somewhat or very upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party. (4)

The divide is along racial, age, and educational lines. As Professors Gould and Pozen point out:

Simply put, white voters favor Republicans decisively, and non-white voters favor Democrats even more decisively. In presidential elections since 2008, Republican candidates have won white voters by margins of 12% to 20%, while Democratic candidates have won Black voters by margins of 81% to 91%, Hispanic voters by margins of 36% to 44%, and Asian-American voters by margins of 27% to 47%. In recent decades, a parallel gap has opened up between increasingly Democratic-leaning younger voters and Republican-leaning senior citizens and between increasingly Democratic-leaning women and Republican-leaning men. The contemporary partisan gap with respect to education is especially striking--highly educated voters now tend to support Democrats and less educated voters to support Re-publicans--in that it represents an inversion of dynamics that prevailed as recently as the early 2000s. (5) In one sense, deep polarization is not new in the United States. For its first seventy-five years, the country was profoundly split over the issue of slavery. A civil war is the most extreme manifestation of a divided nation. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and the 1960s certainly divided the country. When I was in college, the country was seriously split over the Vietnam War.

Yet, I also believe that the country is more deeply divided today than it has been at any time since the Civil War. Why? What can be done about it? I am an expert in constitutional law and worry that I have little to add in thinking about these questions. But I will try to address them, focusing especially on the role of the Constitution in contributing to the divide and perhaps solving it. And I will recommend one concrete step a president can take to mitigate the role appointing and confirming federal judges plays in exacerbating the divide: an executive order creating a merit-selection process for federal judges. This short essay is not a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but rather some thoughts about it. (6)

1. WHY?

   Countless factors contribute to the political divide in the United States. I would point to a few of them.

   First, to state the obvious, there is a huge difference in values among Americans; liberals and conservatives disagree about countless basic questions. In constitutional law, this is reflected constantly on the Supreme Court. In October Term 2019, the Court decided fifty-three cases with signed opinions after briefing and oral argument. (7) Thirteen were 5-4 decisions. (8) In ten of the thirteen, the majority was Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, with Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan dissenting. (9) In two of the thirteen, the majority was Roberts with the four liberals, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. (10) On all of the major constitutional issues--separation of church and state, gun control and gun rights, rights of criminal suspects and defendants, death penalty, abortion rights, protection of gays and lesbians and transgender individuals from discrimination, affirmative action--there is a huge gulf between the liberal and conservative justices. This gulf mirrors the great disagreements that exist in American society on these and countless other issues.

   There is an obvious and large difference between the Republican and Democratic platforms, or, in the recent election, between the views of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The fact that 81 million people chose one and 74 million chose the other illustrates the deep disagreement in values in our country.

   Second, the non-democratic nature of American government as enshrined in the very text of the Constitution exacerbates this polarization. In my view, the Electoral College makes no sense as a way for a democracy to choose a president. During the 2020 presidential election, everyone focused on the vote counts in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, and which candidate could get enough electoral votes to reach 270 in the Electoral College. Less attention was paid to the fact that Joe Biden decisively won the popular vote by over seven million votes.

   In a democracy, the candidate with the most popular votes should win. But five times in American history, including in 2000 and 2016, the loser became president of the United States. (11) This anti-democratic feature of the Electoral College was intentional. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 68, explained that the "immediate election [of the president] should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station." (12) He wrote that a "small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." (13)

   The Electoral College also was very much a product of the compromises concerning slavery that were at the core of the Constitution's drafting and ratification. Before considering the method of choosing the president, the Constitutional Convention had agreed to the "three fifths clause," the provision in Article I of the Constitution providing that slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining a state's population for allocating seats in the House of Representatives. But slaves obviously could not vote. Southern states would not get the benefit of this population in presidential elections.

   The Electoral College was proposed to deal with this: electors would be allocated based on seats in Congress, meaning that slaves would count towards the number of electors each state received. If the president were directly elected by the voters, voters in the North would outnumber voters in the South because the South's half-million slaves were not voters. The Electoral College meant that each southern state could count its slaves as three-fifths of a person in its share of votes in the Electoral College. This was explicitly understood and expressed at the Constitutional Convention. (14)

   But it is not just the Electoral College that is antidemocratic. Every state, regardless of population, has two senators. A voter in Wyoming (population 582,000) enjoys roughly 70 times more influence in the Senate than a voter in California (population 39.5 million). When the Constitution was written, the difference between the largest and the smallest states was 12.7 to 1; (15) now it is 68 to 1. (16) Senators representing as little as 17.6% of the population can...