Don’t let the bland management-consultant affect fool you.
It’s not just the self-identified socialists who aim openly to destroy the American constitutional system of government. And the evidence of this isn’t just from the ill-considered enthusiasms of the perfervid 2019–21 period. In an interview on Steven Bartlett’s podcast, The Diary of a CEO, Buttigieg comes out yet again for destroying the American systems of electing presidents (the Electoral College), Congress (single-member House districts), and our Supreme Court (via Court-packing). Buttigieg shot to prominence in 2019 by pushing Court-packing, which reminds us that no, it’s not a response to Dobbs or other post-2020 decisions. He tells Bartlett that “our entire existence has been about creating a different kind of political system and introducing it to the world,” but now we should be “reforming, tuning up, changing that political system.” He says that Trump prospered by saying, “I’m going to blow it all up,” but Buttigieg’s view is, “I think he’s blowing up all the wrong things.” Trump’s promises, he says, “spoke to something that I think a lot of people had on their mind that made a lot of people willing to burn things down. And there’s a lesson for my party in that.”
How does he propose to strike the match? On proposing to end the 237-year-old Electoral College, “I still can’t believe that anybody considers this radical.” On the House, “it worked for school board or city council where sometimes you get more than one vote and more than one person wins. We could do that for Congress. The people get the top three votes. Not just one, get to go to Congress. So you’d have bigger districts, fewer districts, harder to gerrymander.” Never mind that the Supreme Court’s liberals found multimember districts unconstitutional and racially discriminatory four decades ago. His Court-packing plan includes “term limits, more justices, and some process that makes it less partisan who the justices are,” and if you believe that would mean fewer ideological progressives, I have a bridge to sell you. On restricting political speech by more campaign finance restrictions, he says:
When we talk about the most cherished part of the Constitution, many people will say the First Amendment, right? That’s the one that gives us free speech. And we miss that the word “amendment” being in there signals to us that it wasn’t part of the original text of the Constitution. It’s an amendment. It’s something they had to add on after. So is the Second Amendment. I mean, all of them by definition, right? So we shouldn’t be afraid of that kind of thing.
Yes, actually, if we love America, we should be very afraid of Pete Buttigieg. Don’t let the bland management-consultant affect fool you about the radical threat that such men pose to our constitutional order.