Welcome to the 3rd Edition of Fault Lines in the Constitution! And Why It’s Needed

In August 2025, Texas governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the state legislature to deal with several issues, including a ban on cannabis products and the recent catastrophic flooding of the Guadalupe and Lampasas rivers. President Donald J. Trump demanded that Abbott add an item to the agenda: redraw the state’s congressional districts to ensure that five additional Republican members of Congress would be sure to be elected in 2026. The majority-Republican state “lege” complied, even though this was midway between the 2020 and 2030 censuses, when redistricting is required and is almost always conducted. (As of this writing, the outcome hasn’t been determined.)

Democrats have also created maps that skew electoral results. In 2022, Oregon, which gained a seat in the House after the 2020 census, flipped from having three Democratic representatives and two Republicans to having five Democrats and only one Republican. Both New York and Illinois, which lost a seat, replaced four Republican-leaning districts with three Democratic-leaning ones. A state court in New York then decided that the Democrats had broken the law by overreaching, and Republicans ended up gaining several districts.

Purposely plotting to increase representation of one political party over the other one in the House is called partisan gerrymandering. As a result, many Americans accurately believe that their congresspeople do not represent their political views and might downright oppose them. The process also takes on racial overtones if states try to create or eliminate districts that Black people and other minorities are likely to win. The issue of gerrymandering has become increasingly frequent, weaponized, divisive, and bitter. This issue is also one of the updated chapters in the third edition of our book, Fault Lines in the Constitution. And—spoiler alert—it is a reason that we lowered the grade we give to the Constitution in this edition. In 2019, when the second edition was published, we gave it an overall C. Now, in 2025, the Constitution is barely scraping by with a C-. We’ll show you why by highlighting some of the developments in the book.

This post is longer than usual. Hang in there with us! A lot has happened since 2019. Here is a sampling.

The Senate

In the chapter on the Senate, called “Big States, Little Say,” we show how the two-senators-per-state requirement mutes the voices of most people in the country while giving a megaphone to the fewest. Here are some key, updated examples.

• In 2023, less than half the people in the country were spread across forty-one small states. With eighty-two senators, they had more than four times the pull in the Senate than all the others. The rest of the population converged in just nine big states that have larger cities and more diverse populations but only eighteen senators.
• About a quarter of Americans live in a total of twenty-six states, giving this fraction of the populace over half the Senate.
• More people live in Washington, DC than in Vermont. Nevertheless, Vermont has two senators while Washington has no voting representation in Congress at all. Here’s how that plays out:

• Almost 90 percent of all Americans—including 84 percent of gun owners—favor background checks of people who want to buy guns. Nevertheless, there are enough senators from states with low populations, who prefer unchecked gun ownership, to prevent such legislation from passing. They include both states with liberal senators, like Vermont, and those with more conservative senators, like Idaho.

Voting Rights

Because the Framers sidestepped deciding who should have the right to vote and how, each state gets to make up its own rules. As a result, there is a hodgepodge of procedures and requirements across the country. Recently, a few states made it easier to cast a ballot while a majority of them made it harder.

Here are some examples from Chapter 8.

• Twenty-two states require citizens to have lived in the state for ten to thirty days before registering to vote. The other twenty-eight have no residence requirement.
• Some states refuse to count college students as residents or make it practically impossible for them to vote while at school.
• Ten states forever disenfranchise individuals who commit certain crimes. The range of crimes varies from murder to merely writing a bad check, as in Mississippi.
• Maine, Vermont, and DC, on the other hand, allow people convicted of felonies to vote even while they’re serving their sentences. Some foreign countries, such as Norway, also allow this.
• Fourteen states and DC do not require identification during voter registration.
• Thirty-six states require that voters produce some form of identification at the polls

Emergency Powers

As we explain in Chapter 19, presidents can claim sweeping powers when they decide “the public Safety may require it.” (US Constitution, Article I, Section 9) This is thanks to the National Emergencies Act, which passed Congress in 1976. This law gives the president almost total leeway to declare a national emergency, without stipulating any criteria. Almost any situation can be considered an emergency. And once one is officially declared, the president can then ignore more than 130 laws, giving the chief executive a lot of power.

In 2022, President Joe Biden declared students’ college debts an emergency and forgave a portion of their loans. In both 2019 and 2025, Trump declared illegal border crossings an emergency. During his first administration, he diverted funds from the military to build a wall along the border between Texas and Mexico. Then, in his second, he used the declaration as a means to deport thousands of immigrants, many of whom were in the country legally.

Both actions have led many critics to charge that presidents have gone way too far.

Unitary Executive

This issue refers to the powers that the Constitution gives to the president. In 2025, under President Trump, this is the granddaddy of all issues. We have written a series of blog posts called “I’m the Boss” because, with the help of Congress and the courts, he has taken those powers and run with them, far exceeding the authority of any previous administration.

Here are two examples. The president has:

• abolished multiple national and international programs called for and funded by Congress and
• fired tens of thousands of government employees whose jobs should have been protected by the Pendleton Act, which Congress passed in 1883 to be sure that civil servants are not let go for political reasons.

There are other developments with the third edition. It’s a little more than 40 pages longer than the previous one, partly because we added two chapters. Every time we update the book, we find more fault lines. The two newest chapters are:

• Chapter 15: How Dare You?!/ Impeachment. We’re not sure how we neglected this hot topic the first two times. But we did write a blog post about it.
• Chapter 20: You’re Not the Boss of Me!/ Secession. This chapter raises the question of whether the Framers should have addressed the idea of secession—even if they banned it—in the Constitution.

Of course, we also updated all of the information about states’ activities and constitutions and those of other countries as well as all data and statistics, such as the voting rates and presidential pardons.

For these and many more reasons that we explain in the new edition, we believe the Constitution has aided and abetted threats to the democratic process—even undermining democracy itself—in the US. What do you think?