How to fix the Constitution in a divided Washington

Imagining a constitutional reform that could actually earn cross-partisan support

Joe Biden.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock, Wikimedia Commons)

President Trump continues to contest the outcome of the presidential election, albeit with essentially no success and no real prospects for any. But his failure in the courts has not been matched by failure in the only court of public opinion that matters to him: that of his own base. An increasing proportion of both Republican voters and (more alarmingly) Republican officeholders seem to believe (or at least claim) that Biden's victory was not fairly won.

I remain resolutely confident that both the legal wrangling and the political noisemaking will have no impact on the final result, and that Joe Biden will be inaugurated the 46th president on Jan. 20. But it hardly feels like an auspicious time to think about reforming our democracy to make it stabler and more responsive — the subject of this column. As I said before the election, “Constitutional moments come at times of profound and hard-won consensus.” When we can't even seem to agree on whether the sky is blue without first checking whether Donald Trump said it's green, how on earth could we come together to make fundamental changes to our system of government?

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.