Volume XLVI

American history has known one founding and one refounding. The first, in 1787, built a republic on paper and left its deepest contradictions unresolved. The second came after the Civil War, when Reconstruction's amendments tried to make the promise of equal citizenship real. Both were acts of construction undertaken after a rupture — the first after revolution, the second after civil war. This issue of The Pragmatic Papers proceeds from a hard premise: we are living through a rupture that may demand a third.

The essays gathered here do not agree on tactics, but they share a diagnosis. Each institution meant to check power has, in its own way, stopped working as a support for liberal strength. A Senate rule with no basis in the Constitution has let minorities govern majorities. A House frozen at 435 seats for a century has made representation a fiction for most Americans. A Supreme Court that depends entirely on public faith for its authority has spent that faith faster than any generation before it. A presidency has claimed emergency powers Congress handed over and never took back. And a president and his allies have tested, seemingly without cost, how much of the Constitution's plain text — on insurrection, on emoluments — can simply be ignored.

None of these are new complaints. What is new is the argument this issue makes collectively: that these are not five separate malfunctions to be patched individually, but one constitutional order that has drifted from the design its framers actually intended, and that reasserting that design is not radicalism but restoration. Uncapping the House, ending the filibuster, rebuilding congressional power over the administrative state, reforming a Court that has become a partisan instrument and finally enforcing the accountability provisions already written into our founding document — these are not separate reform agendas competing for attention. They are the elements of a single project: maintaining liberal strength in a republic so that it governs by majorities, answers to the people it represents, and holds its officials to the law it claims to honor.

A third founding, like the first two, is to be avoided if possible. However, we liberals must strengthen ourselves out of institutions that already exist but have stopped doing their jobs if a third founding is forced upon us. The essays that follow are not a platform. They are an argument that the tools for this work are already in our hands — if we're willing to use them.

-Cara, Editor-in-chief