Democrats, urges political journalist and podcaster Cohen, need to stop playing nice, which has been what allowed autocracy and plutocracy to rule the land. Instead, he writes, Democrats \u201cneed to understand [that] the old norms aren\u2019t coming back\u201d: Congress now functions like a parliamentary system, where \u201cthere is no notion of bipartisanship, no value placed on agreement across the aisle. There\u2019s a majority, and that\u2019s where the power lies.\u201d Americans also need to recognize that there\u2019s \u201cnothing conservative\u201d about the so-called conservatives in power, he writes; the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025 is \u201cradical and revolutionary,\u201d and it means to strip Americans\u2014pretty much everyone except straight white males, that is\u2014of their rights. The work after Trump will take years, the author says, and it will involve constitutional amendments and a wholesale remaking of the government: \u201cOur goal should be the transformation of our institutions, not merely their restoration.\u201d To that end, he argues, a number of key steps will need to be taken. One is to eliminate the filibuster, which \u201cprotects a status quo that the voters have rejected time and time again.\u201d On that note, he adds, since the popular vote seems not to matter much anymore, the Electoral College needs to be scrapped. Still more sweeping is Cohen\u2019s call to remake the Supreme Court, adding four more justices (one for each federal circuit court), term-limiting them to eight years (which, Cohen notes, 76 percent of Americans support), and requiring a justice\u2019s retirement at age 70. Add to that his suggestion, among many others, to retool the Justice Department, so a whole division is devoted to prosecuting \u201ccorruption cases throughout the Trump years.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Democrats, urges political journalist and podcaster Cohen, need to stop playing nice, which has been what allowed autocracy and plutocracy to rule the land. Instead, he writes, Democrats \u201cneed to understand [that] the old norms aren\u2019t coming back\u201d: Congress now functions like a parliamentary system, where \u201cthere is no notion of bipartisanship, no value placed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6810,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}