To the editor: UC Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s proposal for a new U.S. constitution is a superficial campaign advocacy piece that would throw the baby out with the bathwater.
He measures our current Constitution against some nonexistent ideal of perfect democracy, compared to which our present system is self-evidently “absurd.”
He should pay less attention to current polls and more attention to history. The “frightening reality” of the republic in the “abyss” of political apocalypse is far more likely to emerge from throwing the Constitution in the garbage can and starting over.
Tom Weiss, Woodland Hills
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To the editor: Memo to the people of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota and Delaware: You are still allowed to control the internal affairs of your states, but you may no longer interfere in the policies and affairs of the United States. Those are now completely controlled by California, Florida, Texas, New York and Pennsylvania.
Your representatives are still allowed to show up in Congress, but don’t expect anyone to take them seriously. Your power is dissolved. You are still part of the United States, but in name only.
Do not forget how meager your population is. You now have an insignificant say in matters of national interest.
Your equal representation in the U.S. Senate has been abolished. You no longer matter in Congress nor in U.S. elections, where your electoral votes are as tiny as you are.
Why bother to vote? You are now second-class states. So, stay in your place. The founding fathers are long gone. You’ll get over it.
That is apparently Chemerinsky’s revisionist view of the new United States. Thankfully, the threshold required to rewrite the Constitution is extremely high.
William Goldman, Los Angeles
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To the editor: I’m surprised that Chemerinsky ignored the short-circuiting of Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution.
The constitutional minimum of one representative for every 30,000 people was a threat to rural American nativists, so instead of growing Congress along with our population, membership in the House was frozen at 435 voting representatives in 1929.
Since a state’s electors are allocated based on its number of senators and representatives, the Electoral College would have remained robust if Congress were allowed to grow, and the popular vote would be better reflected than it is today.
Rather than going through the complications of amending the Constitution as Chemerinsky suggests, a simple congressional change of law to cancel the 1929 Reapportionment Act would suffice. The battle would be to get current members of Congress to dilute their own power.
Pini Herman, Beverly Grove
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To the editor: The Electoral College has to go. It’s ridiculous that we go through this every four years when the future of the country could be balancing on the whims of just one state.
Furthermore, it has been shown over and over that when a president doesn’t have a popular mandate, that presidency is not a successful one.
The founders probably had a very good reason for structuring the election as they did, but that was almost 250 years ago. There is no justification today for this lopsided system.
Zena Thorpe, Chatsworth
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To the editor: Mr. Chemerinsky, I believe former President Trump agrees with you that the United States needs a new Constitution. Be careful what you wish for.
Larry Furman, Woodland Hills
