new video loaded: Our Founders’ Mistake
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transcript
Our Founders’ Mistake
The Opinion contributing writer E.J. Dionne thinks America’s founders made a mistake. In this round-table conversation for “The Opinions,” he tells David French and Michelle Cottle why the Constitution doesn’t fit today’s Congress.
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I think the biggest mistake the founders made — and they realized it pretty quickly, because they’re the ones who started the first party system — they wrote a Constitution as if political parties didn’t exist because in principle they didn’t believe in them. And so they thought the branches of government would be so jealous of their own rights, would have a kind of institutional patriotism, a phrase my friend Norm Ornstein likes to use, that that institutional conflict would be enough for one branch to check the other. In this circumstance, there is no institutional patriotism going on in Congress at all. It’s a party spirit that, for the moment, seems prepared to support President Trump on everything. And it’s clearly — and maybe David will disagree with me on this — but I think that is clearly infecting the United States Supreme Court as well.
October 11, 2025
