Letters: US ungovernable? I warned you

Princeton economist Paul Krugman says that America is lost. He says it is ungovernable. I agree. I agreed back in 1980, when I ran for the U.S. Senate and called for a review of the American constitutional order.

My campaign led to the Committee on the Constitutional System, led by former presidential counsel Lloyd Cutler, C. Douglas Dillon, U.S. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, Bill Fulbright and such scholars as Jim Burns at Williams and Jim Sundquist from Brookings. Our recommendations were submitted to the president and Congress at the 1987 constitutional bicentennial, but neither major party responded. Gridlock worsened.

I ran again. I wrote books and articles. But the government withered, bouncing from constitutional crisis to crisis. Krugman writes now of a Supreme Court appointment, blaming Republicans for the current obstruction. But was it not the Democrats who had the most to gain from a four-year House term, Woodrow Wilson’s inclusion of Cabinet members in the Congress and other reforms? How many, like my 1980 opponent Fritz Hollings, stood up for the government?

Maybe we are lost. Approaching age 75, I mourn.

This story was originally published March 1, 2016 at 1:20 PM with the headline "Letters: US ungovernable? I warned you."