Politico Co-Founder Says Constitution Must Be Rewritten To Stop Donald Trump

Politico’s new owner may lean right, but the rag’s founding editor, John F. Harris, said in a Thursday column that the Constitution must be rewritten to stop former President Donald Trump – who he calls a “constitutional menace” who exploited the Constitution’s “defects” in order to win the 2016 US election.

“Correcting or circumventing what progressives reasonably perceive as the infirmities of the Constitution, in fact, seems likely to be the preeminent liberal objective of the next generation. Progress on issues ranging from climate change to ensuring that technology giants act in the public interest will hinge on creating a new constitutional consensus. Trying to place more sympathetic justices on the Supreme Court is not likely to be a fully adequate remedy,” Harris wrote, adding “There are more fundamental challenges embedded in the document itself — in particular the outsized power it gives to states, at a time when the most urgent problems and most credible remedies are national in character.”

Harris mocked conservatives’ ‘solemn reverence’ for the Constitution, suggesting that it’s ” become a way of signaling right-mindedness across the political spectrum, even among Trump supporters whose actions plainly undermine constitutional order. In much of this rhetoric, the Constitution is elevated from a secular document to a sacred one, infused with mystical dimensions,” he wrote.

Then he shreds the founding document.

“Another answer, however, is: Who cares what [the Founders] thought then? The Constitution was written at a time when states were indeed foundational — a central part of people’s identity and way of life. This has not been true for nearly a century, as both national government and national identity have become stronger,” Harris continued, before listing several amendments that he says could already gain “majority support” for the nation – including “altering or abolishing the Electoral College, term limits for the Court, creating some check on abuse of the pardon authority,” and rewriting “the infuriatingly murky language of the Second Amendment.”

Harris worked for the Washington Post for two decades, covering the Clinton White House between 1995 and 2001. In 2007 he co-founded Politico with former partner Jim VandHei, who went on to co-found Axios.