The New York Times treats us today to an op-ed by Prof. Sanford Levinson entitled “Our Imbecilic Constitution,” with the remedy recommended for such imbecility taking us well beyond reforming the document’s amendment provisions. The problem, you see, is that our government has become “dysfunctional” owing to “gridlock.” Like all good Progressives, Levinson is a government man: he sees problems for which no less than the federal government is the ready solution, but that’s unlikely under the strictures our “imbecilic” Constitution imposes on it.

Not surprisingly, therefore, he starts with a complaint about federalism: in the Senate, small states have power equal to that of large ones, which in turn implicates the Electoral College. The remedy for the problems Levinson believes can be traced to those checks on power is to unleash popular will through a more direct democracy. Thus he lauds Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Progressives who “seriously questioned the adequacy of the Constitution.”

Theodore Roosevelt would have allowed Congress to override Supreme Court decisions invalidating federal laws, while Woodrow Wilson basically supported a parliamentary system and, as president, tried to act more as a prime minister than as an agent of Congress. The next few years saw the enactment of amendments establishing the legitimacy of the federal income tax, direct election of senators, Prohibition and women’s right to vote.

Never mind the merits of those accomplishments, Levinson next offers various state constitutions as models for what might be, starting with New York’s, its fifth such document. One hopes the Knickbockers get it right before too many more years pass, because if dysfunction be the touchstone of failure, the Empire State has come close to it.

Then again, Levinson offers this idea for fixing congressional gridlock:

We could permit each newly elected president to appoint 50 members of the House and 10 members of the Senate, all to serve four-year terms until the next presidential election. Presidents would be judged on actual programs, instead of hollow rhetoric.

“Programs:” We need to get things done. Isn’t that what government is for?

To be sure, there are problems today that cry out for solutions, yet most are not inherent in the human condition but rather are the result of government “programs.” After all, it’s entitlements, individual and corporate, that have given us our massive deficits and debt, to take only the largest and most conspicuous examples. That is the one thing that Levinson does not seem to appreciate.

As compared to the rest of the world, our Constitution has stood the test of time fairly well. The problems we now have did not arise from abiding by its limitations but just the opposite. The Progressives ignored those limits. It’s that behavior, on which the New Deal and the Great Society doubled down, that has brought us to this impasse, with the country immersed today in the politics of a zero-sum game. We don’t need a new Constitution. We need to return to the one we have.