Also, Lisa L. Miller's paper named Amending Constitutional Myths challenges popular beliefs about U.S. Constitution, an excerpt from the paper said "Students come into my constitutional law class armed with their high school civics lessons and terms such as checks and balances, tyranny of the majority, government overreach and even states’ rights., But these alleged virtues, which I call “constitutional myths,” actually tell Americans very little about who wields power, how it is used, and to what end. Worse, they perpetuate misconceptions about mass publics, exaggerate the threat posed by government, and undervalue the possibilities for collective action through government policy. In other words, our constitutional myths get a lot wrong. As a result, they reduce the ability of Americans to hold the government accountable for responding to the political interests of mass publics and for limiting the influence of the most privileged at the expense of the masses, My argument here is simple: Any serious discussion of amending the Constitution must offer a clearer understanding of how our current constitutional system works in practice, and it must begin with the recognition that constitutions shape who gets power, how they wield it, and to what end. If we are going to amend ours, we need to jettison comfortable tropes and start getting serious about power. We need a new, shared language that will help citizens know the Constitution’s purpose, its levers of power, and how to access them, The first step in this process requires a kind of constitutional translation, decoding the constitutional language that lauds our Constitution’s design into the language of realpolitik. Doing so reveals that our fragmented Constitution deprives average Americans of routine access to political power, benefits the few over the many, and obscures these realities through opaque constitutional myths, My research over the past 20 years has largely focused on how the highly fragmented nature of the U.S. constitutional system structures political power. Fragmentation refers to fundamental features of the U.S. Constitution that disperse power in ways that create both distinctive and decentralized arenas of authority.5 The primary constitutional features of this fragmentation are separation of powers (particularly between the executive and legislature), bicameralism (two, equal branches of Congress), equal representation in the Senate (overrepresentation of low-population states), federalism (concurrent and distinctive jurisdictions between state and federal governments), judicial supremacy, and the Electoral College, Terms such as checks and balances can apply to most of these features such as the expansion of presidential lawmaking in relation to Congress (separation of powers), the capacity of the federal judiciary to strike down acts by elected branches and officials (judicial supremacy), and the fluid and overlapping jurisdictional boundaries between the national government and the states (federalism).9 Though legal scholars appear less inclined to see the Electoral College as a valuable form of checks and balances, Charles Fried defends it for the check it puts on popular majorities by giving states influence qua states, In fact, after both the 2000 and 2016 elections, there was no shortage of public commentators ready to defend the institution for various checking and balancing purposes, including defending against the dangerous will of the people, the most populous cities, demagogues, or the biggest states, The presumption of virtuousness that both scholars and laypersons alike assign to all of this fragmentation is hard to overstate. In practice, however, institutional fragmentation inhibits the ability of government to respond to clear and persistent majority preferences and creates opportunities for powerful political minorities to win out instead, The repeated failure of the government to respond to the preferences of clear majorities then dilutes political capacity and undermines political legitimacy, Moreover, it leaves little room for political narrative and understanding of the persistent success of corporate power in financial gain, while wages and life opportunities for average Americans stagnate, I am not the first to claim that understanding how the U.S. Constitution fragments power is essential for understanding the Constitution as a whole and U.S. politics, But I am not sure we fully appreciate the extent of the institutional fragmentation that our Constitution creates nor do we see the mismatch between the language we use to describe fragmentation, language such as checks and balances, states’ rights, government overreach, and tyranny of the majority—and how fragmentation actually shapes and distributes political power, Before beginning, I want to articulate a few a priori assumptions. First, I assume that, no matter the constitutional design, elected officials in a democratic country should, as a general matter, be permitted to govern without interference. I leave aside questions about whether and when limitations on that power should be imposed. Here, I am not interested in the tensions or potential conflicts between democracies and constitutionalism as per Richard Bellamy, Jeremy Waldron, Sanford Levinson, and others, Rather, I want to focus on the routine, everyday capacity of government to provide mechanisms through which the public broadly conceived—can understand, express, and vindicate its political interests, Second, this is not a constitutional history. For the purposes of this paper, the intentions and goals of the Framers are irrelevant. Rather, I seek to illuminate how common tropes of constitutional discourse—e.g., checks and balances and tyranny of the majority—offer inaccurate and misleading understandings of political power under our constitutional system today. In other words, how would today’s advocates and allies of a government by and for the people evaluate the constitutional mechanisms through which power is shaped and utilized under the U.S. Constitution, This Article proceeds in four Parts. In Part II, I explain the idea of constitutional myths and draw on three of these myths: checks and balances; states’ rights (and its corollary, government overreach); and tyranny of the majority, I illustrate the ways in which these terms are typically deployed and then illustrate how they are often manipulated for a wide variety of ends by a range of (primarily) elite actors. While their use is common, they lack any objective legal or political referent. Moreover, I reveal how the myths not only obscure who is wielding power and for what purpose but also how they inaccurately convey a neutrality in U.S. political institutions. In practice, fragmentation is particularly damaging to the capacity of the government to produce public goods and comprehensive social policy. Part III preemptively responds to critics who argue for the virtues of these constitutional terms.18 I conclude, in Part IV, with proposals for new, more accurate language for understanding constitutional power structures in the United States, My focus here, however, is less on what Americans do not, My focus here, however, is less on what Americans do not know than on what many think they do know. The widespread assumption that terms such as checks and balances, tyranny of the majority, and states’ rights have some meaningful referent—an identifiable definition that is discernable through close scrutiny of the Constitution’s text or jurisprudential reasoning—is rarely challenged, But once we scratch beneath the surface, it becomes difficult to sustain these assumptions.23 Constitutional structures are not neutral, organize power in particular ways, enabling or inhibiting who has access to it, how, and for what purpose.25 In this section, I look at several terms that are commonly used with respect to the virtues of the U.S. Constitution, checks and balances; states’ rights (and its corollary, government overreach) and tyranny of the majority. I explain what they mean in terms of power and how they obscure the interests they serve, In the vernacular, checks and balances is typically used in reference to different branches of government checking one another, so no one branch gets too powerful, If you ask people what checks and balances mean, as I frequently do, you are likely to get some version of the tautological response that checks and balances means checking and balancing, But what Americans call checks and balances, political scientists frequently call veto points (or veto players), and the comparative virtues of veto points are not at all clear, Veto points are largely defined as “individual[s] or collective actor[s] whose agreement is required for a policy decision,” and generally, the more of them there are, the harder it is for policy to change.29 Put simply, veto points disperse political power, and in doing so, they produce multiple venues where consent is required to create policy, This creates opportunities for narrow political interests to capture a particular veto point and win out, despite popular preferences, The dispersal of political power seems inherently virtuous, particularly when one’s civic education is rooted in James Madison’s The Federalist No. 51, in which he explains the justification for separating power across many units, By dispersing governmental authority, the argument goes, we restrain the inherent desire of human beings to consolidate their power, The invocation of checks and balances implies political power is disarmed in this way, Hillary Rodham Clinton described “our constitutional checks and balances . . . as an immune system protecting us from the disease of authoritarianism, The comparative evidence, however, is less sanguine about the democratic value of multiple veto points. At least some studies suggest that the more veto points a political system has, the lower the quality of democratic outcomes including reduced accountability, greater inequality, and lower social-welfare provision."