Hot Takes
Political Parties Are The REAL "Illegal Fourth Branch"
Amid this rolling constitutional crisis, Trumpists up to Vance and Trump themselves have made the claim that the federal bureaucracy, having grown out of control, now represents an unconstitutional “fourth branch” that the Founders never envisioned.
But let’s be real. If they are at all an extra- or supra-constitutional branch, then they certainly aren’t the fucking fourth. They’re the fifth at best!
As promised in the subtitle, though, anyone who wanted to embark on a serious analysis of extraconstitutional branches would immediately be faced with the conclusion that the political party system itself is the first such one — having been born in the 1790s and early 1800s — and thus deserves the title of Fourth Branch.
And it’s also clearly the most evil branch, the one that has indeed corrupted the Founders’ intent, and which is absolutely the most responsible for the current crisis.
I’ve recently started falling out of love with arguments that say stuff like, “Before we deal with Problem A, we must deal with Problem B, because it’s a root cause of A!”, because if we played that game, we’d be playing it all day long until we deconstructed all of civilization.
Rather, the project of capital-p Progress is to plot the way forward given the limitations posed by the current system. This almost inevitably means technological innovation. And the best innovation we could do right now? It’s time to incorporate these extraconstitutional branches. It’s the only way to tame them without chucking the entire Constitution in the first place.
Most non-totalitarian political systems have developed parties so if one somehow disestablished the ones we have, something similar would probably take its place.
What specifically do you have in mind? Removing the state level legal frameworks? Possible a good idea.
Why not chuck the Constitution and start over? It was written for a totally different time. They did not foresee political parties and thought that power would exist at the state level. They devised a system of checks and balances to make it difficult for the federal government to pass laws. This has resulted in frustration with the system and a desire by many to ignore it - as we are seeing now with Musk and Project 2025.
People haven't wanted to call for a Constitutional Convention because they are scared of what might result. I think it would make sense to have various political groups work on a new constitution before calling for a convention. Once there was a document that most people agreed with there could be a constitutional convention to adopt it. This assumes that everyone works in good faith and that the convention isn't hijacked with a different constitution formulated in secret.
I think a new system could have the country split into different sections based on geography and political beliefs. Each section would handle it's own local laws and tax collection. There would be free trade and travel across the sections, similar to how there is in the EuroZone. Programs like defense, Social Security, and Medicare could continue on a national level, though I guess there might be ways to opt out of some of them.