Democrats Need to Lead the Second Reconstruction
Trump's authoritarian assault has decimated our institutions that 'kitchen table' issues won't fix
One year into his second term, Donald Trump has transformed American democracy into something approaching one-man rule. The corruption is open and on a massive scale, his self-dealing, bribery, and kleptocracy no longer even disguised. He has destroyed all independent oversight meant to constrain abuse, stuffing the administration with incompetent loyalists willing to follow his every whim. He has usurped the powers of Congress—spending, taxing through tariffs, the appropriations power itself—and treated court orders with contempt and defiance. Abroad, foreign policy lurches chaotically with no discernible principle but his daily mood. The way he has conducted the Iran War—vacillating between ultra-belligerence and surrender (and finally settling on the latter)—is proof of that. And everywhere you look his name and face are slapped onto the machinery of the state, the monuments and institutions of the republic defaced to flatter one man—the White House, the reflecting pool, the federal buildings remade into Trump shrines. No prior administration has trashed the Constitution on anything approaching this scale.
This is not normal politics turned up to 11. It is a rejection of the constitutional operating system itself, the very premise that government power is bound by law.
A break of that magnitude demands a response of that magnitude. America has answered crises of governance before. In the post-Watergate reckoning, Congress responded to Nixon’s abuses with the National Emergencies Act, the War Powers Resolution, the Impoundment Control Act, and a suite of guardrails meant to bind every future president.
When the republic defeated its most existential threat in American history, we responded by adopting, among other changes, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. The rupture we now face is closer to the Confederacy, a massive rebellion against the Constitution, than it is merely a bad president. In response to this crisis, the country needs a second Reconstruction.
And yet Democratic leadership is preparing a midterm campaign that treats this as a side issue. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries mention Trump’s lawlessness but pointedly resist organizing a campaign around it. The real action, in their telling, is on prices: groceries, rent, insurance premiums. “Kitchen table issues,” in the inherited cliché.
There is a kernel of sense in this. Voters feel squeezed, and a party that ignores their pocketbook will lose. But the prescription—talk about costs, leave the constitutional emergency to the commentariat—rests on a condescending theory of the electorate. People can tell when they’re being patronized by empty politician-speak.
It also misses what those voters already understand: expensive groceries, skyrocketing gas prices, and rising interest rates are the same story as the constitutional crisis. Corruption and the destruction of our governing institutions are not separate from cost of living. Corruption and government lawlessness are a tax on everyday Americans.
Voters may not put it in the language of Article I, but they understand that a system where rules are meaningless is a system that picks their pockets. “We will lower costs,” with no account of why costs got high, sounds like an incantation. It asks voters to ignore that the man breaking the federal government is the one also making their lives less affordable.
A Reconstruction agenda would do better, not just on the merits but as a political strategy. There are three big things to do.
The first is to take back the powers the presidency has accumulated over the last century and never should have had. Congress has handed the executive open-ended authority over war, trade, sanctions, spending, and emergencies, on the assumption that the president might be wrong but would at least be acting in reasonably good faith. That assumption is gone. Those statutes need to be rewritten for the executive we actually have. Crucially, mechanisms that only check presidential power if Congress can muster supermajorities for a veto override are effectively useless.
The second is to make accountability real. The pardon power must be reformed to strip the president of so much unchecked power to shield his own cronies and accomplices. The impeachment threshold, set at an effectively impossible 67 senators, needs to come down to something that demands bipartisanship without guaranteeing failure. Those would both require constitutional amendments, but other changes would not. The Senate can give itself a secret ballot in impeachment cases simply by adopting a rule, as South Korea used to remove its own would-be authoritarian. This change alone likely would have resulted in Trump’s conviction and disqualification after Jan. 6, making impeachment a credible threat.
The third is to seriously reform the electoral system whose broken incentives brought us to the point. Our rigidly two-party, winner-take-all structure manufactures the polarization and minority rule that strongman politics feeds on. Multi-member districts with proportional representation, restoring fusion voting, and other reforms conducive to more multi-party competition could give voters real choices and lower the stakes. Both major parties are unpopular and Americans overwhelmingly say they want more choices, but the status quo denies them that freedom.
Here is the part that will be hard: Every one of these reforms limits the power of whoever enacts them. If Democrats hold both Congress and the presidency, they will have to pass laws that constrain their own president while he or she holds office. They will have to reform the system that, in that moment, has just put them back in power. But that is the whole point. If a party will not bind itself while it is in power, the binding never happens at all.
But the immediate, material advantage for Democrats in running on a message of self-limitation that it will signal their sincerity to American voters. (Péter Magyar, who decisively defeated Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán recently, ran on a platform of restoring a two-term limit to his office.) Such a message will credibly signal that the party means to fix the system, not capture it. American voters can tell the difference between a party that wants to end the abuses and a party that wants its own turn at them.
Big structural reforms pair naturally with the economic message Democrats already want to deliver: we will lower your costs because we will rebuild a government that answers to you instead of whoever owns it this month.
The objection from leadership will be that this is too abstract, too institutional, too risky. It misreads both the moment and the country. Americans have grasped the urgency of structural reform before. The window for Reconstruction opens only when the abuses are fresh, and it closes fast. Watergate’s guardrails passed within a few years; nothing comparable has passed since. If no Democrat picks up the mantle of reform in the immediate aftermath of Trump, the moment passes, the abuses calcify into the new normal. Reform delayed is reform abandoned.
Republicans led the first Reconstruction. It is up to Democrats now to lead the second.
A longer version of this essay first appeared in The Bulwark.
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A good start. Just a side add to this = Lets not forget that reforms and guardrails are needed for the Supreme Court. This is [also] a high priority, and I felt it needed to be explicitly said. Thanks!
During Reconstruction Republicans were closer to what Democrats are today. Article's closing comment may be misleading to those who don't recall that. And yes, today's Democrats need to lead a new Reconstruction. Republicans certainly won't.