Episode 12. Our Undemocratic Constitution with Sanford Levinson

Any serious discussion about a peaceful political revolution in America would be incomplete if it did not include a conversation with today's guest. Sandford Levinson holds the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law.  

Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is currently Professor of Government at the University of Texas in Austin. Levinson is the author of over 400 articles and book reviews as well as six books, including, Our Undemocratic Constitution; Framed: America's 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance; and co-author of the graphic novel along with Cynthia Levinson of, Fault Lines in the Constitution. He has edited or co-edited several leading constitutional law casebooks, including; Processes of Constitutional Decision making; Responding to Imperfection; Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies; Legal Canons; and The Oxford Handbook on the United States Constitution. 

Levinson has taught law at Georgetown, Yale, Harvard, New York University, Boston University, as well as the Central European University in Budapest, Panthéon-Assas University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, London, Auckland, and Melbourne. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has argued that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution limits the government's authority to regulate private gun ownership. Levinson has called for term limits for Supreme Court justices along with a growing list of scholars across the ideological spectrum. He is also a vocal critic of the unitary executive and excessive presidential power. In the magazine Dissent, he argued that "constitutional dictators have become the American norm." He wrote an essay titled "The Decider Can Become a Dictator" in which he criticized a system which allows presidents to make dictatorial decisions of great consequence without providing ways to discipline those who display bad judgment. 

Levinson has criticized the Constitution for what he considers to be its numerous failings, including an inability to remove the President despite a lack of confidence by lawmakers and the public, the President's veto power as being "extraordinarily undemocratic", the difficulty of enacting Constitutional amendments through Article 5, and a lack of more representation in the Senate for highly populated states such as California. He has often called for a Second Constitutional Convention and the "wholesale revision of our nation's founding document."

Levinson participates in a blog called Balkinization which focuses on constitutional, First Amendment, and other civil liberties issues, as well as a blog, called Our Undemocratic Constitution. With Jeffrey K. Tulis, he is co-editor of the Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought and also of a new series, Constitutional Thinking at the University Press of Kansas.  He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association in 2010. 

I began my quest for a genuine solution to the political dysfunction in the United States over ten years ago when I first opened the cover of his book, Framed. It has proven itself to be not only relevant today but required reading for anyone interested in addressing the failures and shortcomings of our uniquely undemocratic American Political system.