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Fiddling with the Constitution to limit existing state rights in favor of pure majority rule should be rejected.

Yet, there’s a movement afoot to do just that. It really isn’t all that new. An earlier example of this movement culminated in 1913 with the ratification of the 17th Amendment. The primary changes the 17th Amendment made to the Constitution was to provide for the direct popular election of U.S. senators, a function originally reserved only for the state’s legislatures. As a result, the ability of less-populated states to exercise their co-equal rights was eroded.

Presently, a push is gaining momentum to circumvent the Electoral College, in favor of a national popular vote. Changing how Senate seats are assigned to states is also being advocated. A “census-based” system like the one used for determining the number of seats in the House of Representatives, thereby, giving more populated states more seats and votes in the Senate.

Whatever form and approach, the common goal is to replace the democratic republic form of federal government with pure democracy.

The Supreme Court’s recent reversal of Roe has increased calls for eliminating the Senate filibuster. It’s true the filibuster is only a Senate rule, not law, so its elimination wouldn’t directly challenge, or violate the Constitution. However, it does indirectly affect the co-equality of states guaranteed by the Constitution.

Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at the Catholic-affiliated Duquesne University, gives what he considers four good reasons in his recent opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

According to Ledewitz, supporters of ending the Senate filibuster believe that the potential benefits from the filibuster’s demise, both for the Senate and for American democracy, outweigh any potential negative consequences.

Proponents view one probable consequence of ending the filibuster to also be a welcomed benefit. Ledewitz enthusiastically anticipates and endorses that it will permit voters to “[give] control of the government to one party, that party could enact anything that the Constitution permits.”

He glibly dismisses this outcome as, “So what? We have a name for that situation. It’s called democracy… Sounds like a good sys­tem. We should try it.”  Presumably because voters can always vote out the one party out. This naively ignores the reality of how difficult it is to remove one-party rule once in power.

Most Americans would agree that one-party rule does not “sound(s) like” Democracy. Because it is, in fact, tyranny, only going by the name of democracy. And it’s not at all what the Constitution’s framers envisioned for a democratic republic form of government.

A good argument can be made that one reason for the filibuster rule in the Senate is to give a tool to senators in the minority for asserting or forcing senators in the majority to recognize their state’s co-equal rights. The left-leaning non-profit Brennan Center for Justice acknowledges, “that a group of senators representing a small minority of the country can use the filibuster to prevent the passage of bills with broad public support.” Predictably, they view this practice unfavorably. But, in fact, the practice is vital for ensuring equal footing among all states in the union on the Senate floor.

Without the filibuster, states whose senators are not in the majority risk losing their co-equal footing with the states in the majority. They will become more prone to having their Senate voices and rights diminished, ignored, or abused.

Supporters of pure democracy would do well to first reflect on the Framer’s own reasoning for rejecting it. The Framers chose their words carefully and precisely. They did so because they knew well that their words would one day be used against them, or rather, more detrimentally, against the Constitution which they were setting down as the new law of the land.

It’s important to note that the Framers deliberately chose to open the Constitution with “We the People.” This introduction was not phrased this way only to show whose authority and behalf they were given the power to represent and speak. But also, whose rights and interests they were beholden to defend.

If they intended only to speak for the majority of people, as in a pure democracy, they would have rightly and precisely written, “We the Majority of the People…” They did not, because they intended to represent equally all the people, the people both of the majority, and of the minority. They intended to create what Abraham Lincoln would later immortalize at Gettysburg, a national “government of the people, by the people, for the people” — all the people.

The Framers didn’t reject pure democracy because they instead preferred minority rule, but because they had a keen understanding and distrust of human nature. More so, of the tyrannical tendencies of human nature concentrated anonymously as “The Majority.” One party ruling over a minority is the same as an absolute monarch, as King George. They absolutely did not want or intend this.

That same precision was used in the careful choice the words when naming the new country. The name was to describe its true character, The United States of America. “States,” by design, hold a prominent and central position in the name.

Subsequent nations would choose names familiar to all as much for what they are, as for what they are not, such as, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), aka North Korea. These nations, of course, are neither (purely or remotely) democratic nor protective of individual rights. The American democratic republic, the United States of America (USA), is both!

Had the Framers intended a pure democracy, pure majority rule, they would have enshrined it in the nation’s name. They would have named it some variation to those chosen by China and North Korea. And if they had, time would have proved pure democracy to be no less tyrannical in practice than the actual systems of these two other countries with free-sounding names.

“States” hold a prominent and central position in the naming of the United States of America by design because the Framers wanted to clearly communicate that the new nation was to be a union of individual states, peopled by individuals with common but also distinct interests.

By experience, from when the states were joined together only by a loose confederacy, they knew a republican form of government was preferable to a confederacy. They could also perceive how one day, what’s good for a “California” and a “New York” may not be good for a “Montana” and an “Ohio.” Thus, they also knew that a democratic republic form of government was preferable to either a pure republic or a pure democracy.

pure democracy may sound good on paper and may seem a no-brainer to modern American mind. But for good reason, it does not appear anywhere on the paper of the U.S. Constitution. The Framers understood well that pure democracy would ultimately only lead to poor democracy. Pure democracy is poor democracy because it does not adequately protect the rights and unique interests of all the people from the dangers of a tyrannical majority. If pure democracy did not sound good to the Framers, most assuredly, “one party rule” did not sound to them anything at all like democracy. We definitely should not try it.

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