Tag: the constitution

Texas Republican Cites Little-Known Rule That Could Stop DSA Radicals From Being Sworn Into Congress

Texas Republican Rep. Keith Self believes he knows a way to keep DSA radicals from being sworn in to Congress, if they win their races. He should reach out to Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who is also looking into this.

Rep. Self believes these candidates cannot swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution because their own platform describes their desire to destroy it.

How can they swear to protect something that they want to destroy?

FOX News reports:

Little-known rule could stop socialists from being sworn into Congress

A little-known congressional maneuver could block members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) from being sworn in as members of the House of Representatives next year, even if they win their elections on Tuesday.

Members-elect must swear an oath to uphold the Constitution before they can become full members of the House. At the beginning of a new Congress, that oath is typically taken en masse by all 435 members, led by the House speaker.

But an argument circulating in conservative circles posits that any member-elect can challenge another member-elect’s right to be sworn in, provided they have compiled evidence that that person would not uphold their oath. That would then lead to House-wide deliberations followed by a vote on whether that member-elect has a right to be sworn in.

In the case of DSA members, one potential argument could be the group’s platform calling to scrap the current U.S. Constitution and draft a new one. Several DSA members and self-proclaimed democratic socialists have already won primaries across the country.

Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, suggested to Fox News Digital that he could invoke the maneuver.

“You cannot swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution while actively working to destroy it. The oath of office is not just words you say at a ceremony. It is a belief. It is an oath to our country and our fellow countrymen,” Self told Fox News Digital.

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Our Failed Constitution

“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.” ~ Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

The U.S. Constitution was ratified to create and to restrain the government. It established boundaries beyond which the government may not venture, even when it invokes national security, public order, economic necessity, emergency or the will of a popular majority. Its purpose is not to make government more powerful but to keep the government off the people’s backs.

By that measure, the American Constitution is a failure. Formally, the document physically survives, its ceremonies continue, and politicians swear their oaths to abide it. Yet functionally, the government it was designed to restrain has accumulated vast and totalitarian powers that its authors would never recognize.

Power grows, concentrates and perpetuates itself, while liberty contracts. Every emergency supplies a justification for new authority. Every temporary restriction threatens to become permanent. Every president discovers powers that his predecessors claimed but that the Constitution never authorized. And every generation is told that the latest surrender of freedom is necessary to preserve freedom itself.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 criminalized criticisms of government officials. Newspaper editors and political opponents faced prosecution. The government that had declared independence from a distant king was punishing Americans for criticizing their own elected officials.

The contradiction was extraordinary. The First Amendment had been adopted precisely to prevent the federal government from suppressing political expression; and it was ratified by some of the same human beings who later voted to undermine it. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison resisted these measures, recognizing that a government that could legally determine which political opinions may be expressed will eventually confuse criticism with sedition. And so it did.

During the Civil War, the Lincoln administration suspended habeas corpus, imposed military dictatorships which arrested civilians, and directed armies to kill civilians. In Ex Parte Milligan (1866), the Supreme Court invalidated Lincoln’s arrests without trial and affirmed a principle that ought to be self-evident: Neither Congress nor the president can simply replace constitutional government with personal or unaccountable authority.

But that did not stop Woodrow Wilson from arresting those who verbally opposed the draft or Congress from establishing the administrative state as a fourth and unaccountable branch of government or FDR from arresting Japanese-Americans for being Japanese-Americans.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created the Federal Reserve System, a central banking institution with authority over monetary conditions. It triggered unlimited money creation, and the eventual abandonment of gold convertibility in 1933 and the end of the dollar’s international gold convertibility in 1971.

The Federal Reserve today creates money whenever it wants, and its monetary expansion weakens the purchasing power of money and transfers costs onto future generations.

The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA and established the national security state as the fifth branch of government, truly unaccountable. The United States had emerged from World War II with unprecedented military power and global ambitions. Rather than return to a posture of restraint, Washington established over 850 worldwide permanent military and intelligence institutions designed for a world of perpetual confrontation and American domination.

The CIA was created to collect intelligence, not to serve as the president’s personal army. Nevertheless, its history of secret interventions, covert actions, murders, tortures and even domestic operations conducted beyond ordinary public scrutiny raises a fundamental constitutional question: Who controls the government when the government acts in secret?

The national security state also perpetuates itself. Agencies justify their budgets through threats; military establishments seek new missions; presidents discover that secret operations are politically easier than openly debated wars. What began as a response to a particular international crisis becomes a permanent structure of government. The republic that once warned against standing armies and foreign entanglements is now a failing empire that thrives on both.

The Patriot Act of 2001 extended this pattern into domestic surveillance. Enacted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it radically expanded surveillance authorities available to federal agencies, and it unleashed the federal government’s mass suspicionless and warrantless surveillance; today capturing every keystroke and conversation transmitted on fiber optic cables anywhere in the U.S.

Across these episodes, the pattern repeats itself. Government restricts speech in the name of stability, expands executive power in the name of war, weakens monetary discipline in the name of economic management, conducts secret operations in the name of security and broadens surveillance in the name of preventing terrorism. Each measure arrives with an explanation. Each emergency is declared exceptional. Yet the accumulated result is a government more powerful and a citizen less secure in his liberty. And none is countenanced by the Constitution.

Was Jefferson right that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants? His famous language arose from the revolutionary generation’s experience and its fear of concentrated power. It expressed a belief that liberty cannot survive without eternal vigilance and a continuous willingness to resist oppression.

The deeper question is whether the Constitution can preserve liberty when the people entrusted with enforcing it benefit from its erosion. The answer depends upon whether Americans treat government as their servant or their master.

In the long march of history, power tends to grow because those who possess it have incentives to retain it, while those who surrender their freedoms rarely recover them. All of these attacks on liberty were enacted or performed with popular support even though the Constitution was crafted to prevent Congress and the president from popularly or unpopularly impairing personal freedom.

If Americans fail to regard freedom as a birthright, the Constitution may survive as a historical document while the constitutional republic it created becomes a bankrupt failure.

The Constitution cannot save a people who have abandoned the principles from which it sprang. Ultimately, liberty survives only when the governed insist that the government remain within its constitutional limits. If it won’t, we must alter or abolish it.

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The Tyranny of One Man’s Opinion

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office — one of whom was St. Thomas More — and even the king’s second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell’s son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen’s guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of “the tyranny of one man’s opinion.”

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process — a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers’ money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration’s attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president’s characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker — or even a mass murderer — does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians — beyond the thousands he has already killed — if a peace agreement is not soon reached.

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump’s war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president’s personal assessment of Iran’s nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department’s compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president’s personal belief — whether informed or uninformed — is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump’s tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump’s vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power — and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man’s opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man’s conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions — particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man’s opinion.

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The Constitution Can’t Protect You If You Don’t Protect It

“What if the rights and principles guaranteed in the Constitution have been so distorted in the past 200 years as to be unrecognizable by the Founders? What if the government was the reason we don’t have a Constitution anymore? What if freedom’s greatest hour of danger is now?”—Andrew P. Napolitano

What’s the point in celebrating the Constitution one day a year if we permit the government to violate it the other 364?

September 17 marks the anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution, a document designed not merely to establish a government but to restrain it.

Yet restraint is in increasingly short supply.

Across the political spectrum, Americans continue to tolerate abuses of power so long as those abuses are carried out by the “right” people, against the “wrong” people, or in the name of some emergency deemed too important to question.

That is how constitutional government dies.

Not all at once. Not with the Constitution formally abolished or the Bill of Rights ripped from the National Archives.

It dies by degrees: through executive power that expands while congressional authority withers; emergency powers that never quite disappear; wars waged with little regard for constitutional restraints; surveillance systems capable of tracking whole populations; federal agents empowered to operate with ever less accountability; military forces normalized on American streets; and courts that too often allow questions of standing, immunity and procedure to determine whether unconstitutional conduct will ever be confronted on its merits.

Every such precedent makes the next abuse easier. Every exception becomes a justification. Every temporary power becomes harder to claw back.

And every time Americans excuse an unconstitutional act because they approve of the person wielding the power, they help dismantle another guardrail meant to protect them when someone they distrust eventually takes control.

That is the danger we face.

The Constitution was never intended to depend upon the goodwill of those in power.

Quite the opposite.

Those who drafted the Constitution understood that power corrupts, that governments inevitably seek more authority, and that liberty survives only when power is divided, constrained, challenged and made answerable to the people.

The Constitution creates friction intentionally.

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9/11’s Aftereffect: The Constitutional Accountability Abyss

Over the last several weeks in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S., I’ve had American and foreign journalists ask me the same question: how did 9/11 change America?

My answer has generally been some version of this: 9/11 didn’t change us, we allowed it to change us, and in doing so critically damaged our very own political way of life.

We allowed our Arab American and Muslim American fellow citizens to become targets of federal surveillance and to be placed on secret government “watch lists” in the absence of any evidence they’d committed a crime.

We allowed the creation of the most sweeping and invasive surveillance dragnet in American history – first in secret via the National Security Agency’s (NSA) STELLAR WIND program and then openly through the passage of the PATRIOT Act just six weeks after the attacks.

We allowed a previous American president to lead our nation into a war against a country – Iraq – that had nothing to do with al Qaeda’s terrorist atrocities. The drama came complete with a televised presentation of “evidence” to the United Nations Security Council of the continuing threat Saddam Hussein allegedly posed to the region – evidence that turned out to be false.

We allowed those who opposed George W. Bush’s war of choice against Iraq to be targeted by the FBI with surveillance and informant penetration operations that mirrored some of the worst Cold War era tactics employed by J. Edgar Hoover and the organization he led.

We allowed our government to set up secret torture chambers around the world for captured Arab and Muslim men – the CIA’s “rendition, detention, and interrogation” (RDI) program (a.k.a., the torture program). Some, like Khalid Shaik Mohammad (KSM), were directly responsible for the attacks. Others not only had nothing to do with the attacks but no involvement with terrorism at all. And through it all, the U.S. abandoned the very principles of justice under law and due process that it had proclaimed to the world since the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after World War II. That torture program has already damaged the legal case against KSM.

And we allowed the president who authorized these things to get away with all of them and leave office legally unmolested.

I’ve used the phrase “we allowed” because we who are citizens of the Republic cannot escape our responsibility for what George W. Bush did, even if we voted for his opponents in 2000 and 2004.

Yes, there were those who went into the streets to protest the Iraq War and the creation of the Guantanamo prison and its dysfunctional, sham trial system. Those who risked police batons, tasers, and tear gas to raise their voices against unjust wars and the torture of those we captured deserve remembrance and praise. But they were too few in number to alter the course of events because too many of their fellow Americans did not join them when it mattered most.

I witnessed these events from a different angle, that of a senior House staffer working for then-New Jersey Democrat Rush Holt during the final four years of Bush’s presidency. Holt’s repeated efforts to stop runaway surveillance programs from his position on the House Intelligence Committee frequently came to naught because of the refusal of many of his colleagues to join his efforts.

Bush’s authorization of the secret STELLAR WIND mass electronic surveillance program after the 9/11 attacks was a direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. It literally represented an impeachable offense, as was his authorization of the CIA’s torture program. And even though multiple impeachment resolutions against Bush or then-Vice President Dick Cheney were introduced, they went nowhere – even though Democrats controlled the House during Bush’s last two years in office.

The fact that not a single House GOP member signed onto any of those resolutions no doubt contributed to the failure to hold Bush accountable for his misconduct in office. It was a posture that stood in stark contrast to the seven House Judiciary Committee Republicans who joined their Democrat colleagues in voting to impeach Richard Nixon for his crimes in office over 30 years earlier.

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When War Comes Home: A Constitutional Warning

A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere.

The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military power, the dangers of presidential overreach and the enduring wisdom of the Constitution’s separation of powers. It was unauthorized, unconstitutional, illegal, strategically incoherent and — by the standards by which wars must be judged — a geopolitical failure.

The American people were told that force would achieve clear objectives. Iran would be compelled to surrender. Somehow, American security would be enhanced. The region would become more stable.

Instead, the United States expended enormous resources, consumed scarce munitions, deepened regional instability and failed to produce the political outcome President Donald Trump promised. Senior military officials just last week warned him that extending large-scale operations risked exhausting critical military capabilities and weakening America’s ability to respond elsewhere.

The United States can destroy buildings, eliminate targets, deploy aircraft, ships, missiles, drones and troops anywhere on the planet. But war is not a video game in which the destruction of enemy assets automatically produces political surrender. War is a contest of wills, societies, culture and endurance.

And here is the constitutional question that should have been asked before the first bomb was dropped: Who gave the president the authority to begin this war? The Constitution did not.

Article I, Section 8 gives Congress — not the president — the power to declare war. The framers deliberately rejected the British model in which kings could drag nations into conflicts based upon personal judgment, ambition or political convenience. James Madison warned that the executive branch was “the branch of power most interested in war,” and therefore the Constitution placed the decision to enter war outside the president’s constitutional reach.

The president is commander in chief. He commands forces after lawful congressional decisions have been made. He does not possess the power to transform his title into a personal authority to begin wars.

That principle has been repeatedly recognized by the Supreme Court. In cases such as Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the Court rejected the idea that President Harry Truman had unlimited power simply because he claimed national security. Justice Robert Jackson’s famous concurrence warned that executive power is most dangerous when it operates in a “zone of twilight” where presidents attempt to expand authority beyond constitutional boundaries and without congressional concurrence.

The Iran war belongs precisely in that twilight — where executive ambition collides with constitutional restraint.

The administration may argue that modern threats require flexibility. That argument has been made by presidents of both parties for decades. But flexibility is not the same as unlimited authority. The Constitution was written for difficult moments, not easy ones. It was designed to restrain presidents even when they believe they have compelling reasons to act.

The military failure abroad has created a political dilemma at home. A president who promised victory must now confront the reality that victory was never achieved.

The danger is what happens next.

History teaches that political leaders who suffer public humiliation abroad often seek demonstrations of strength elsewhere. Foreign-policy failure can produce domestic overreach. Leaders who cannot achieve the desired result overseas may attempt to prove their power through actions at home.

That is where the war comes home.

The president, frustrated by military limitations, may turn toward radical immigration enforcement, Supreme Court-prohibited tariffs, statutorily prohibited domestic deployments of military forces, stealing foreign-owned oil, and assertions of executive authority that collide with free speech and free association.

But the Constitution does not permit a president to substitute disappointment for law.

The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person — not just Americans — shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The Sixth Amendment guarantees all persons — not just Americans — from whom the government seeks life, liberty or property the right to a public trial before an impartial jury, and other constitutional protections. These protections apply not because accused persons are necessarily innocent but because government power is too dangerous to operate without restraints.

Evidence is not conviction. Accusation is not guilt. Presidential assertion is not judicial judgment.

The executive branch cannot simply identify alleged criminals in speedboats or elsewhere, declare them enemies and impose punishment without trial. That is a system the American Revolution rejected.

The same principle applies to the use of military force inside the United States. The founders were deeply suspicious of standing armies being used for law enforcement. That suspicion produced constitutional protections and later statutes prohibiting the military’s role in civilian law enforcement.

The military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats. It is not a presidential police force.

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DSA Steering Committee Member Cliff Connolly Shares ‘Hatred of the United States Constitution’ as the ‘Obstacle We Finally Have to Get Over to Have a Revolution’

The War Room’s Natalie Winters shared a disturbing video from the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) Steering Committee member Cliff Connolly, admitting what we already know about the far-left organization….they hate the very principles on which America was founded.

Winters shared a clip from the Varn Vlog podcast episode “The Revolution in Democracy: Marxist Unity Group’s Vision for DSA,” released on July 7, 2025 in which Connolly shares his ‘hatred of the United States Constitution.’

Additionally, he describes the Constitution as an ‘obstacle’ that the organization will ‘have to get over’ to have a revolution

The panel discussion, hosted by C. Derick Varn, includes Connolly, and Amy Wilhelm, Jean Allen, and Aliyah VanPelt, who are members of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a caucus within DSA.

Connolly stated, “So the two things that we’re famous for, uh, is our commitment to a program and our, uh, hatred of the United States Constitution.”

“And what the program does is it gives us a roadmap to revolution, and it gives us the obstacle that we finally will have to get over to have a revolution, which is the United States Constitution, the basis of the United States government.”

“And what the Minimum/Maximum Program specifically, what that format specifically gives us, is that roadmap. It gives us the minimum circumstances under which we would be able to take power and govern, and it gives us the maximum program, which is the goals that we’re actually aiming for.”

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Democrats Dismiss Our Constitutional Traditions As ‘Nostalgia’

It appears that the Madisonian democracy has joined shackets and combat boots as embarrassingly outdated for many on the left. In calling for radical changes to our constitutional system, leading Democrats are now calling the lingering loyalty to our traditions as mere “nostalgia.” To be nostalgic in today’s parlance is to be a dupe of the oligarchs and an enemy to reform.

“Nostalgia” has become the new coded term for reactionaries among Democratic figures, who are trying to convince Americans to accept radical changes to our republic after 250 years.

Kamala Harris recently insisted that opposition to ideas like packing the Supreme Court is mere “nostalgia” for a system that is no longer working. “I would caution us against talking about rebuilding with any sense of nostalgia about how things work, because even before, they weren’t working so well for a lot of folks,” she said. That “nostalgia,” according to Harris, is preventing us from doing things like packing the Supreme Court with an instant liberal majority.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) last week also declared that “nostalgia is not working” and, while refusing to embrace socialism, added that “capitalism as we know it doesn’t work.”

Morris Katz, a political strategist for Zohran Mamdani, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash about looking beyond the label of democratic socialism and instead simply to accept that “our government does not work.” They are joining socialists who have long promised revolutionary changes without “introspection, nostalgia or regret.”

It is an all-too-familiar pitch. Sixty years ago, a call to break free of “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits” revolutionized a nation. That call was heard in a Chinese paper that would help lay the foundation for Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution. Marxists had long rejected calls to preserve institutions and citizens’ rights as “nostalgia” and “sentimentality,” standing in the way of needed progress.

For the Democratic Socialist of America organization, nostalgia stands in the way of getting rid of the Senate, presidency, and the Supreme Court to fundamentally change the republic.

The effort is to condition Americans to adopt radical changes to our core institutions that professors and pundits say will guarantee Democrats never lose power again.

That is not an easy task for a people who have benefited from the oldest and most prosperous democracy for 250 years. They have to be very angry or very afraid to take such a radical course.

The Soviets understood that about the U.S. After Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent working in the media, defected in 1970, he revealed the four stages by which the Soviets hoped to bring about revolutionary change in the U.S. It began with undermining our institutions and values, with the help of journalists and academics.

With establishment figures lining up behind radical changes, including packing the Supreme Court, the public is hearing a constant drumbeat of how our system is broken.

Even Democratic judges are joining the chorus. Indeed, some appear to be auditioning for the slots promised by Democratic leaders to take over the court with a reliable liberal majority.

This week, the Hawaii Supreme Court issued an unhinged diatribe against the U.S. Supreme Court that abandoned any semblance of judicial restraint or decorum. It declared the majority as effectively racists, saying that “The Roberts Court sees only white.” It portrayed the court as a rogue institution that “overrides what Congress passed. It overrides what the people chose. All to serve its own ends.”

It is an opinion that would make an MS NOW host blush. But it follows a pattern on the left to get people to turn against our institutions and even against the Constitution itself.

Others are telling the public that they are being repressed by the Constitution, which must be scrapped. In a New York Times op-ed — “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” — law professors Ryan Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

In yet another New York Times editorial, Jennifer Szalai denounced  “Constitution worship” and claimed that “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us. A growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.”

Berkeley Dean Erwin Chemerinsky insists that it is time to trash the Constitution in favor of “radical changes.”

These voices are seeking to remove all of the moderating elements of our system —the safety features that have produced the world’s most successful and stable republic. They are the very constitutional elements protecting us from the tyranny of the majority, protecting us from ourselves.

Without those protections, we will unleash the self-destructive forces that have been tearing apart other democratic systems since Athens. It is our constitution that spared us from that fate. As James Madison observed, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Of course, history has shown that such radical proposals ultimately produce not democracy, but what the Framers called mobocracy. If we let that happen, many Americans will indeed look back at the last 250 years with a tragic sense of nostalgia.

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Jack Smith team read messages between Trump officials, dozens of lawmakers of both parties: ‘Ran roughshod over the Constitution’

More than 40 members of Congress had their text messages viewed by former special counsel Jack Smith’s team amid a probe into President Trump, a move that Republicans say “ran roughshod over the Constitution.”

The Department of Justice released records to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday revealing that the special counsel’s office had accessed communications between Trump White House personnel and 44 lawmakers from both parties.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ); Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the current ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee; current Los Angeles mayor and former Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.); and former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, were just some of the new names whose messages were seen.

Grassley himself, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), House Majority Leader Steve Scalies (R-La.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) were also targeted.

Asked during a December 2025 congressional deposition whether his team looked at “the content of text messages” during his twin probes into the 45th and 47th president, Smith answered, “No.”

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TERRIFYING: Far-Left Democratic Socialists Unveil Radical Plan to Abolish the Senate, Replace the President and Supreme Court, Grant Mass Amnesty, and Overthrow the U.S. Constitution

The radical left just showed its hand again, and it is even more extreme than most Americans could have imagined.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the far-left organization that has heavily influenced the Democrat Party, has rolled out its updated “Workers Deserve More!” platform.

This document is nothing less than a blueprint to dismantle the American constitutional republic and replace it with a socialist super-state run by an all-powerful Congress.

As The Gateway Pundit reported on June 20, 2026, the DSA’s official platform calls to:

  • Eliminate the U.S. Senate.
  • Replace the President with an executive chosen by Congress.
  • Replace the Supreme Court with a judiciary subordinate to Congress.
  • Grant universal amnesty to all illegal aliens.
  • Defund the Department of Defense (which the platform refers to as the “Department of War”).
  • Close overseas U.S. military bases.
  • End American economic sanctions against foreign adversaries.
  • Abolish what it calls the “carceral forces of the capitalist state,” including sweeping police and prison reforms.

If implemented, these proposals would fundamentally transform the American system of government by eliminating the constitutional separation of powers established by the Founding Fathers.

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