Category: Democracy
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A Look Back at Washington State’s Senate Bill (SB) 5843: Constitutional or Not?
By Alexandra Orbuch — Introduced by the Washington State legislature in January 2022, Senate Bill (SB) 5843 attempted to criminalize statements made by elected officials or candidates that: (a) Are intended to incite or produce imminent lawless action and do incite or produce such action resulting in harm to a person or to property; (b)…
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The Problems with Legislative Overrides of Judicial Rulings
By Beck Reiferson and Benjamin Edelson — In April 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order establishing the ‘Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States,’ a commission of legal scholars formed to discuss potential reforms to the Supreme Court. In October of that same year, the Commission released discussion materials prepared…
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National Popular Vote: Circumventing the United States Constitution
By Alexandra Orbuch — In 2016, Donald Trump became President of the United States after winning a majority of electors (he won 304 electoral votes, surpassing the necessary 270 votes) but losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. For reference, the national popular vote is the direct vote of individual citizens. The electoral vote, on the…
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The Attractive Non-Sequitur of Democracy and Distrust
By JC Martinez — When it comes to interpreting the Constitution, there is a critical and possibly irresolvable dilemma which lies at the crux of countless arguments: should justices remain rigidly faithful to the original intent of the document’s writers at the risk of being anachronistic, or should they make substantive value choices at the…
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Tyranny of the Minority: The Unconstitutionality of the Filibuster
By Madeleine Polubinski — In recent years, congressional gridlock has focused national attention on the Senate’s filibuster. The filibuster is the process by which a minority of senators delay or prevent a vote on legislation by speaking as long as possible on the Senate floor, until three-fifths of the Senate invoke cloture, which moves the…
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Making the Case for Trump’s January 6th Speech as Incitement
By Beck Reiferson — On January 12th, Alan Dershowitz, Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School and one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys, published an op-ed in the publication Newsweek in which he argued against the second impeachment of President Donald Trump on constitutional grounds. He reasoned that Trump’s false statements about the legitimacy of…