Three guesses who has the most extreme ideas.
Because the Supreme Court and the Constitution have a well-known liberal bias, amending it has been all the rage among Republican presidential contenders this cycle. There's a whole raft of things they want to do to the constitution to pretend like the 21st century hasn't happened, as
detailed here by
National Journal, starting with the 14th amendment and birthright citizenship.
Ted Cruz set himself apart from much of the GOP field on Wednesday by voicing support for altering the 14th Amendment to end the policy. "Absolutely," Cruz said when asked during an interview if he would be in favor of a constitutional change to achieve that aim.
So far Cruz appears to be alone in backing a constitutional amendment to end birthright citizenship on the campaign trail. But he's not the only Republican eyeing the White House to have called for a constitutional change to overturn the policy.
Rand Paul has been all over that one since 2011, having sponsored a congressional resolution to amend the Constitution and do away with birthright citizenship. Five years ago, Lindsey Graham (yeah, he's still running for president)
said that we "should change our Constitution and say that if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child's automatically not a citizen." And because Trump started all this over again Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, and Rick Santorum have all had to say that birthright citizenship is horrible, but they haven't necessarily been able to articulate what they'd do about it.
The other hot-button constitutional thing these visionaries are coalescing upon is undoing marriage equality, because the one thing the founding fathers wanted to do was make sure there wouldn't be any pursuit of happiness for the gays. Walker and (of course) Cruz want an amendment to make sure that states get to decide on whether or not to discriminate, and Rick Santorum wants it to be enshrined federally, with an amendment that says only one man and one woman can make a marriage. The nation sure can't survive without that.
Then there's a grab bag of other dumb ideas. The perennial balanced budget amendment is endorsed by Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum. It's the zombie campaign platform plank that will never happen. But they've got more ideas on how to fix government. Paul wants an amendment to establish congressional term limits (because he's so original). Marco Rubio is trying to stand out as being really, really serious about killing Obamacare, so he has a constitutional amendment outlawing the individual mandate. Because the Supreme Court was wrong on that one, too.
Because "both sides do it," the article points out that both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton support a constitutional amendment to overturn something the Supreme Court was indeed wrong on, Citizens United. Somehow trying to get rid of the ability of extremely rich people to buy a government with massive, unlimited, secret spending just doesn't seem quite as destructive to the country as the other ideas.