Buttigieg: Democrats Need to Get Serious About Amending the Constitution

In a conversation at The Atlantic Festival with The Atlantic ’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg warned fellow members of the Democratic Party to resist the urge to revert to “the previous status quo” if they regain power in the midterms.

It would be a mistake, Buttigieg argued, for Democrats to try to reverse “the damage” of the past two years of the Trump presidency by trying to restore the country to how it looked in 2022 or “whenever we think that America was great.” He said that Democrats instead need to build for the idea that “the next quarter century between here and 2050, which is kind of a make-or-break quarter century for the whole American project, is subject to very different conditions and problems than the ones that we inherited.” Buttigieg—whom many analysts see as a potential 2028 presidential contender—offered examples of what that vision might look like.

He called for banning gerrymandering and passing a constitutional amendment to address the deluge of money in politics.

“This idea that it is somehow beyond our power to use what is probably the single most elegant feature of the Constitution, which is its capacity to be amended—right?—is a complete failure of ambition and imagination,” Buttigieg said.

When asked by Goldberg about the Democratic Socialists of America, Buttigieg responded that he thinks “there’s a temptation to imagine that being bold is the same thing as being kind of maximally ideological.” Sometimes it is the case, Buttigieg said, that the leftmost idea is the boldest.

But other, more ideologically moderate projects may require “radical reform to our institutions,” he noted.

“I know the commentariat wants to get it all fixed on some left-to-center-to-right spectrum,” Buttigieg continued.

“To me, what’s more interesting is: Do we have the right package of base hits and big swings, and are we going after both of them, at the same time, all the time?” The following is an edited transcript of the conversation: Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to get to the state of our civilization, but there’s this thing—and we’ve talked about this already—there’s this thing that’s been bothering me more than most things bothering me in the last few days.

The fact that a Putin-aligned oligarch, extremely dubious past—as opposed to the oligarchs with a wholesome past— ( Laughter ) Extremely dubious past, funded openly—or not openly, it was discovered, but there’s no secret—funded a two-day celebration for the president of the United States’ son.