JARED GARTZKE | OPINION COLUMNIST
In discussing political topics, I find it enjoyable when I get to discuss the speed that different political parties change. What I mean by “change” when discussing political parties is the different views that political parties put into their platforms, and how those opinions develop between elections. A lot of the time, these changes are almost entirely based on social changes that affect people and, in part, influence their political opinions. To be sure, the major political parties do not change at the same rate.
The Democratic party, the majority party for the political left, whose first president was Andrew Jackson, is the faster of the two parties when it comes to policy change. Some of the noticeable changes in the Democratic party include the change from being the party that voted between 15-20 percent less than the Republican party for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the party that now champions civil rights for minority groups. Another shift that has occurred more recently would be on the topic of abortion. During Bill Clinton’s campaigns in the nineties his platform was “safe, legal, and rare,” where today the democratic platform has reduced the line to “safe and legal”. This is a small shift as far as the phrase is concerned, but it has had a large impact in practice.
The Republican party, the majority party of the political right, whose first president was Abraham Lincoln, has had its shifts as well, but throughout its history has had more teetering effects on its policies than drastic shifts. One of the drastic shifts in the Republican party was their opinion on gay marriage, which was originally held from a position of religion but was changed to a constitutional opinion after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal in 2015. An example of the teetering effect that I mentioned earlier would be directly involving their morality based on religious beliefs in politics. At the beginning of the Republican party, they worked to try and keep their practices based on the constitution, but, after the turn of the century, many Protestant Republicans wanted to enact laws based on their religious beliefs, which resulted in the creation of prohibition. In today’s political sphere, whether good or bad, Republicans strictly keep to the Constitution for what they base their laws on.
Between the two parties, my belief as to why the Democratic party tends to create more drastic shifts in their platform and why Republicans have a teetering effect is simple but still relevant to political discourse. I think what causes this is the way either political party views the Constitution. Something that you will hear from left leaning Supreme Court Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the phrase “living document”. What that phrase means is that the Constitution should be interpreted in a way that accounts for the social morphing that has happened since its inception. On the other side of the aisle is what the late justice Antonin Scalia called an “enduring document”, which means that laws should be interpreted as they were written at the time; if they do not fit, modern society should be changed in the legislature. When it comes to the political parties, I think this is something important, too, because the Democratic party leaves room to separate from constitutional beliefs as society evolves whereas the Republican party teeters because it still tries to move back to a basis found in the Constitution.
St. Norbert Times 