THE CONSTITUTIONAL BIND

An account of the evolution of the Constitution, from document to cult object and beyond.

Boston College law professor Rana opens his astute yet dense book with a definition of “creedal constitutionalism,” a fundamentalist adherence to a Constitution that allows a president to be elected despite losing the popular vote; a Senate that awards two seats apiece to even the most thinly populated states; and a Supreme Court that can do such things as eliminate the right to abortion, despite overwhelming popular support for it. The Constitution as we find it today, Rana continues, suffers from “three clear institutional pathologies that feed off each other,” among them the blockage of legislative governance unless the majority party achieves a supermajority, and rule by a minority bloc that privileges white, rural communities in national decision-making. So-called originalists hold that this is all just as it should be. However, Rana argues convincingly that it does not reflect the political or demographic composition of the nation, which is more liberal—and more urban and more ethnically diverse—than its government would suggest. Interestingly, this originalist cult and the de facto worship of the Constitution are relatively modern artifacts, but with widely varying possibilities. During the New Deal era, for example, “for labor groups, commemorating the Bill of Rights became a way of celebrating the freedom of association and freedom of speech guarantees in the First Amendment,” while in the Cold War, it became a kind of litmus test for loyalty. The author closes with the thought that the Constitution must evolve further to “support [the] long-standing effort to build a transformative majority in American society,” one that recognizes how we live and work and redistributes governing authority accordingly.

An accessible if overstuffed work of legal and political history that speaks eloquently to democratic reform.