Politico's founding editor calls for rewriting of Constitution to prevent 2024 Trump win

Democrats' 2024 presidential prospects have been characterized as being "increasingly bleak." Among the many problems now facing the nation, the White House must contend with responsibility over a looming recession, an unprecedented border crisis, and a devastating opioid epidemic.

With the majority of the country disapproving of President Joe Biden's performance, 67% of voters sure the nation is headed in the wrong direction, and indications that former President Donald Trump may not only be able to win the GOP nomination but potentially the forthcoming presidential election as well, some liberals are contemplating extreme means to keep him off the ballot.

Politico editor versus the U.S. Constitution

John F. Harris, founding editor of the news site Politico, recently suggested in an op-ed that the same system that enabled Trump to get elected in 2016 and to four years later receive 7 million more votes than any sitting president in history must be changed.

Harris wrote that, on the one hand, Trump is "an enemy of the Constitution." Yet Harris also admitted that "from a progressive perspective many of the most offensive features of his tenure were not in defiance of the Constitution."

Despite presenting the former president as a "constitutional menace," it is the Constitution and its "problematic provisions" that Harris intimated are the more menacing.

Harris called deference to the Constitution "the indispensable foundation of American democracy," though suggested reverence would be going too far, particularly if it precludes Americans from drastically altering those foundations.

Harris argued "a new constitutional consensus" is needed in order to prevent Americans from voting for this candidate to whom he is personally opposed and to make progress "on issues ranging from climate change to ensuring that technology giants act in the public interest."

This consensus cannot be brought about just by stacking the Supreme Court with "sympathetic justices," but by addressing "more fundamental challenges embedded in the document itself — in particular the outsized power it gives to states, at a time when the most urgent problems and most credible remedies are national in character."

The system as is will not provide the results so-called progressives desire, so a "constitutional renovation" is needed.

Extra to minimizing states rights, Harris observed an opportunity and need to "clean up the infuriatingly murky language of the Second Amendment," to alter or abolish the Electoral College, and to impose "term limits for the Court."

The obstacles to the realization of the left's agenda are the result of, according to Harris, "what progressives reasonably perceive as the infirmities of the Constitution."

Harris likened the current moment to the latter part of the 19th century, drawing a parallel between former President Abraham Lincoln's abolishment of slavery in the Confederate states with progressives' potential elimination of America's "outdated" and "intolerable" Republican checks and balances.

He threatened that a refusal to transmogrify the Constitution to sate progressives' political ambitions might result in conflict — in civil war.

Harris ultimately claimed that improvisation (i.e., to the Constitution) would be one way to avoid kinetic civil strife. By abolishing the Electoral College and potentially securing the 2024 Democratic candidate a victory by way of the popular vote, war can be averted.

Sparing the demos a choice

Harris is not alone in looking for ways to bypass the electorate to ensure Trump is not elected in 2024.

Former Clinton campaign manager Dick Morris recently suggested that "Democrats have given up opposing Trump politically ... They know he's going to run again, and they know that Republicans are probably going to win because the economy is in such terrible shape."

Morris told NewsMax that one strategy they have adopted is to "litigate him to death, persecution by prosecution."

The August raid on Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence and the corresponding classified documents investigation, E. Jean Carroll's defamation lawsuit, and New York Attorney General Letitia James' fraud lawsuit are three prongs of a broader litigious endeavor to take Trump down.

Earlier this summer, it was suggested in The Hill that testimonies given before the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, protests, could be used to justify the invocation of section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Accordingly, Trump would be formally accused of participation in an insurrection against the U.S. and disqualified from being president.

Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin (Md.), who sits on the committee, suggested earlier this year that the 14th Amendment might serve as "a blockade for [Trump] ever being able to run for office again."

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the former DNC chair who publicly questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 presidential election, indicated she would "continue to explore all legal paths to ensure that the people who tried to subvert our democracy are not in charge of it."

If the 14th Amendment and the lawsuits aren't enough to keep the former president off the ballot, then Liz Cheney, who lost in a landslide to the Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, threatened to go so far as to deprive the Republican Party of her membership.