Sanford Levinson

A good primer on how the Constitution can interfere with modern governance.

Each section starts with a real world example of a problem caused or exasperated by the Constitution, a flashback to what problems our founding fathers intended to address when writing that part, and then ways we have dealt with those problems throughout the history of our country.

I don't think the graphic novel format really helps with the facts presented here, it's still pretty dense and wordy, but worth reading, especially for target audience.… (mer)

Even in graphic novel form, it took me a few days to get through this long and packed history and analysis of the U.S. Constitution. The format kept it from bogging down by taking a look at a modern day problem and following that with a flashback to the debates around the originating issue the Founding Fathers had during the Constitutional Convention in the 1780s. It's full of interesting historical tidbits and offers a decent overview.

Drawbacks:
* It's pretty light on diversity, making only passing mention of the issues of Black, Native, and LGBTQ+ Americans.
* It focuses heavily on the Executive Branch, becoming another of those books that is mostly about what the U.S. President is up to in any given decade.

The authors do court controversy in the final chapter by actually assigning letter grades to how successful the U.S. has been in following through on the promises laid out in the Preamble to the Constitution. I'm sure it's going to earn them quite a lot of hate mail.… (mer)

An interesting but not entirely successful conceit: an essay for each one of the Federalist papers. One result is to highlight that the concerns of the Founders were not our own—though some issues (like party politics) and thus some of the Federalist Papers remain very important, many of the things they worried about are now pretty established, without much fuss. Among the questions of continuing importance: Levinson points out that Publius was concerned to preserve American homogeneity and that this concern still has resonance today, as we make lawful residents wait five years before eligibility for citizenship, and longer before they can serve in the House or Senate (7 and 9 years, respectively), not to mention the exclusion of naturalized citizens from the Presidency. Likewise, anti-Federalists charged that Congress might manipulate the electorate by requiring that the vote take place in one city in a state, predictably excluding a class of voters. Publius responded that Congress wouldn’t do that because of the backlash from the states—but now, of course, we have states that are trying to do exactly this with polling places, and the only plausible recourse is to the federal government, if we manage to make that work ever again.

Levinson is an advocate for a new constitutional convention and a new constitution freeing us from the chronic mis-representation of the Senate and the Electoral College—and he was before 2016, too. He points out that taking Publius seriously would mean being open to serious upheavals in governmental structure, which was after all what Publius sought and achieved. (Among other things, each congressional district in 1789 had a voting population of around 20,000; today each district has roughly 400,000 voters.) “[W]e must ask ourselves if it was only Publius’s generation that had a duty to improve the institutions of American governance in order to perpetuate its central goals …. [W]e must be willing to honor their example not by mindless adherence to their own decisions of 1787, but by standing in their shoes (or on their shoulders) and asking what improvements are necessary in our own time.”… (mer)