Leftists Admit They Can’t Win Without Rewriting The Constitution

Nathan Stone

In his new book, Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, offers the same ideas the left has been repeating for years now.

Seldom does a headline simultaneously proclaim impotency and promise utter destruction, but The New York Times managed it: “Abolish the Senate. End the Electoral College. Pack the Court.”

To be fair, this was not an opinion piece per se but a partial transcript of an episode of Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times podcast, where Douthat interviewed Osita Nwanevu, a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. The occasion was Nwanevu’s first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

Nwanevu’s book is free of original argumentation. His example of why the Senate is “anti-democratic” is that California, a state that could be “one of the 40 largest countries in the world,” only has two senators, which gives a state like Wyoming “about 60, or more than 60, times the representation than people in California.”

And don’t try to say California’s 52-member delegation in the House of Representatives — the largest in the House by far — evens things out: “The Senate shapes the judiciary, it shapes the executive branch, and obviously, it’s a veto point for the passage of even ordinary legislation.” Thus, Nwanevu argues, “we have a fundamental piece of our system that flouts basic democratic principles.”

Never mind that the House originates all monied bills, or that all impeachments must originate in the House, or that House and Senate must both pass a bill before it sees the president’s desk.

His ideas for “saving democracy” are just as moldy. Create new states (his nominees, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., are the usual suspects). Stuff the Supreme Court. Have a national, popular vote for president. The same ideas the left has been repeating for years now. Nwanevu is just the latest parrot to sing the same song for the choir.

The Will of the People

Nwanevu does manage one point of semi-originality when he claims that the will of the people — what many would call the core concept of self-government — is just a mirage:

When you read polls and you say the majority of American people believe this on taxes, and another majority believes this on environmental policy, and a majority believes this on a woman’s right to choose, and so on — these are not all the same group of people. There’s not one “the majority” that’s being represented across all of those issue spaces.

The only legitimate majority in Nwanevu’s mind is the one that agrees on every issue with the regularity of an atomic clock. Forget the idea’s ridiculousness. Forget that these natural factions were the center of discussion for James Madison in “Federalist No. 10.” Forget too that, by this logic, Nwanevu’s own “reforms” would be dead in the water democratically speaking, since the same majority would probably not agree on all of them. Nwanevu only proposes this idea because it allows him to disempower and disenfranchise the people he despises — you.

For Nwanevu, democracy means “fair contests […] where people have an equal chance to contest power, and a majority is the way that we adjudicate who wins a particular contest. If you’re a minority now, you might be in the majority next time.” But all of the democracy-saving ideas he takes out of mothballs stack the deck in favor of his people. Adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states gives leftists four more senators (if the Senate is kept). Scrapping the Electoral College means that flyover country will be squashed by blue cities election after election. Leftists packing the court ensures an airtight progressive majority that will steamroll any opposition to the Borg.

full story at https://thefederalist.com/2025/08/21/leftists-admit-they-cant-win-without-rewriting-the-constitution/