Aziz Rana sparked conversation about the potential flaws of the U.S. Constitution in a lecture on Thursday, introducing his newest book, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them.
Rana, a legal researcher and professor at Boston College Law School, addressed the ongoing debate on whether America should hold the Constitution responsible for the many governmental and legal issues it influences, considering it was written over 200 years ago.
“The book is really motivated by this sense of a basic tension between what we can think of as the political moment we’re all experiencing in some way around the Constitution, and just the cultural experience of what living in the U.S. has been with respect to this text,” Rana said. “There is a basic tension—or sort of foundational confrontation, it seems—between the politics and the culture.”
Rana suggested that basing presidential election victories on electoral votes rather than a popular majority can be interpreted as deeply undemocratic. Nevertheless, there are benefits to the Constitution, he said, including preserving individual autonomy.
“The Constitution protects a sphere of individual autonomy for speech, for religious worship, that ensures preservation of what amounts to one’s own freedoms from an overweening state authority,” Rana said.
Despite these positives, Rana also examined the frequently contested issue of how not following a “one-person-one-vote” system has resulted in leaders winning presidential elections when they don’t have the majority of the country’s support.
“There is this broken feeling that there are some pretty foundational problems with the Constitution, especially when it comes to its ability to represent all Americans in a fair and equal way,” Rana said.
Rana pointed out how this misrepresentation is also reflected in the Supreme Court, where justices are individually selected at the president’s discretion.
“There is this strong sense of constrained representative government tied to the account of the Supreme Court, which speaks to why the U.S. is understood as exceptional, why the U.S. is viewed as distinct from the rest of the world, and why our Constitution can be thought of as imperfect,” Rana said.
The reality of the situation, according to Rana, is that the process has too often led to the dangerous issue of misrepresentation, as well as simply a common sentiment of disappointment among the American people.
“And so it might be the case that more people vote for one party in a particular state, but as it turns out, the folks that end up getting elected to Congress are overwhelmingly from the other party,” Rana said. “And it’s not just the House of Representatives, it also plays out in basically all other elements of our federal system.”
Rana highlighted the importance of debunking the assumption that the Constitution is simply a physical document only relevant to lawyers and politicians. The Constitution, he said, symbolizes a system that impacts the lives of all American citizens and requires our attention.
Rana suggested that a potential solution to the Constitution’s failure to represent the American people equally is to take tangible action toward highlighting underrepresented populations.
“Simplify the amendment process so that you can change the text and include various types of positive socioeconomic rights and alter the basic administrative units of representation so that those units more clearly map on to population centers,” Rana said.
