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What are the Pros and Cons of a Convention of States?
So, it seems we are toast.
This was Ricochet’s overwhelming verdict. The United States is doomed. I admit I took this a bit badly. (I’d always thought it must just be me. I figured a brisk walk, some sunshine, and a stiff drink would set me right. Apparently not.)
There was, however, one response that got my attention. HVTs suggested something I’d never once considered: Using Article V of the Constitution to call a Convention of States:
…. there is a viable way that can turn our ship of state out of the the shoal waters it’s presently navigating.
Fortunately, the Founders foresaw the possibility (some felt it was a likelihood) that concentrating power in a Federal government ran the risk of it becoming a source of oppression every bit as onerous as George III. They left us with a solution as big as the problem: Article V.
Article V, which spells out how to propose and ratify Constitutional amendments, ensures that the States have the means to amend the Constitution without any interference from Washington’s despotic, out-of-control political class. The solution, then, resides with us.
We have all the Constitutional levers we need. We have to stop snivelling, get engaged, stay engaged and demand our State legislators seek the remedies we need through Article V of the Constitution.
Have a look at the website and tell me what you think. I thought it was an interesting idea.
What do you think: Is it worth a shot?
Published in General
Fred – please re-read Comment #14 . . . what you learned in High School Civics was wrong. Dead Flat Wrong.
Article 5 of the Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.
According to what I’ve read none of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention. Since it never happened, I have no idea of how a national convention would work.
All the comments are meritorious. Article 5 provides a process to amend. So what’s it there for? We can and have found brilliant reasons not to use it. It’s risky business for sure. Yet, if it’s to dangerous to mess with, haven’t we de facto abolished it?
Words on paper are meaningless. New words are equally meaningless.
In this instance, the legislatures. There is no chance whatsoever of a progressive Constitutional Amendment passing through Congress with a 2/3 majority. With a convention, things are much less certain.
The fear that Congress would pass a Citizens United Amendment to my mind is a fear that McConnell and about 100 other politicians would all die, at a minimum (it’s not just the Senators that would have to die, but the governors who would appoint replacements, too, and the Lt. Governors). After that, it could get through the Senate. The House would need another massacre, although with the governors already replaced by pod people they’d only need to lose the politicians.
In other words, short of a nuclear attack, I can’t imagine it, and if a nuclear attack came and brought with it a campaign finance amendment to the Constitution, while I love the Constitution, that wouldn’t be a major enhancement to the trauma.
Things that concern me more than Congress passing something like that include Donald Trump winning the Presidency and Fred being generally right about politics.
So armed insurrection then? Secession?
Or just elect the right people? But then nothing is worth less than a politician’s promise.
I agree that the Constitution is just “words on paper” which are easily ignored or misinterpreted. But if we don’t hope for changes in culture which reestablish respect for law and originalism, then American government is unsalvageable.
No, the reason Reid couldn’t get it through the Senate is because he couldn’t get it through the Senate. It would have been a huge political win for him to have gotten it to the ratification stage, at which point it would have been extremely helpful for Democratic political machines to rally around the issue in the states. Whether or not he won, the process would have been a major help.
Obviously, this applies with a convention, too. Not only do we run the risk of changing the Constitution, but even if we’re saved from that, the process is a big help to them in achieving the goals that convention supporters claim to oppose.
Bingo! Politics (including Constitutional understanding) is down stream from culture. Our Constitution could not be ratified by popular vote today. We have a great deal of democracy these days, but unless that is built on a solid foundation of liberty and individual responsibility it will lead to nothing other than tyranny.
I’m happy to talk about this, but first I want you to acknowledge that in this subthread I was not talking about the ratification stage and that your repeated responses were non-sequiturs.
In terms of passage, look at the Senate vote for McCain Feingold. There were only 13 states for which both Senators voted nay, and one of them was Colorado; it seems likely that Colorado and New Hampshire could be flipped. Overturning Citizens United is even more popular than BCRA. I think that McConnell and allies have helped increase support for the First Amendment in the intervening decade, but the ratification process doesn’t have to be instant; you can collect states such that you can ride any short term surge in support. It’s rarer to see states disavow previously accepted amendments than to see them allow previously unadopted ones.
In another time I might be swayed by the possibility of a dangerous, unforseen outcome of an Article V convention. But every day it seems another of our Constitutional protections against a growing Federal monstrocity slips/slides away. The dangerous, unforseen outcome we fear is exactly the outcome we are guaranteed to get if nothing is done. Article V provides the safest, surest, legal way to avoid this.
My prediction … If current trends are left unchecked … Within the lifetimes of my children what we currently understand as ‘conservatism’ will be classified by the Federal government as a hate crime or a mental illness.
(Note – my children are currently in their mid-twenties .)
I don’t know if it was already posted, but Mark Levin wrote a book on this called “The Liberty Amendments”
Many legislatures around the country are already organizing under a balanced budget amendment, but that isn’t going to go nearly far enough.
We’re already living in a run away constitutional convention with all three branches of our federal government.
I will acknowledge that you are not referring to the ratification process but rather to the convention process.
My problem is why. Nothing produced by the convention has any relevance if it is not ratified by the states.
As far as losing states over the years to progressives, the ERA isn’t still out there is it, waiting for a few last hold outs?
Right now, the GOP holds more state legislatures than in generations, and there is a critical mass of people who sense that Washington has gone hopelessly awry.
See comment #68 for one of the harms even if ratification fails, and see #70 for why it might succeed.
The ERA was foolishly voluntarily limited in the time set for it to be passed. There’s no reason for us to believe that they would make that mistake this time.
This is true, but quite a lot of those people believe that Citizens United is why Washington has gone hopelessly awry. I agree that our electoral strength is considerable right now, but because I don’t believe that this will be the case forever, I’m not thrilled by the idea of our voluntarily making the Constitution vulnerable to any future losses we suffer.
Re: the concern that a convention of the states might re-write the Constitution, realize that amending the Constitution requires two steps:
Step 1, an amendment must be proposed. This can be accomplished one of two ways — a.) Congress proposes an amendment, or b.) a convention of states proposes an amendment.
Step 2, the states must ratify the amendment.
To argue that a convention of states could re-write the Constitution, while true, is odd. Congress, which could also re-write the Constitution, sits in session every year. And even if a convention of states re-wrote the Constitution, the states still must ratify it.
(Repeal the 17th!)
This why having a red firewall is key. There are enough reliably red states that any progressive amendments can be rejected in short order. Whereas if there are any meritorious amendments the left has much less certainty of blocking passage.
I just don’t buy it. Again, the last time we had a constitutional convention, they threw out their mandate and rewrote everything. We have precedent for doing that. That’s the part that terrifies me.
Look, not for nothing, but very few people actually want limited government. Politicians who ignore the Constitution (whole paying lip service to it) are just giving the public what they want.
I agree that the red firewall helps make the convention nominating more likely to be merely very bad rather than potentially fatal to the Republic. As I noted, though, even many of those red states voted at least partially for McCain Feingold, and overturning Citizens United would be more popular than that was.
The red firewall might save us, but it might not. I will freely admit that if I didn’t think the Constitution as it currently exists was pretty good, I’d think it worth the risk to change it. Since it seems clear to me that the Constitution is wonderful, though, I see no plausible upside to compare with the likely downsides.
Hi Fred Cole. The outcome that terrifies you is the outcome you are going to end up with by dribs and drabs as each day and week politicians of both stripes and the courts and the regulators move inexorably in that direction. The only legal recourse is Article V. We say we love the Constitution. Lets love all of it … Including Article V.
So I just started reading about this on Wikipedia. Ironically, the 17th amendment is one of the examples where it was proposed by Congress in response to the threat of a Convention. The other’s are 21st, 22nd, and 25th.
So, this makes me wonder if a Convention would ever happen. If there’s that much push for one, Congress would be smart to prevent the States from usurping its power and take control of the Amendment writing process.
The original convention was not convened under Article V because it hadn’t been written yet obviously. Again, the product of that convention had to be ratified by the states. And ratification was conditional on the inclusion of a state inaugurated process for amending. This was the insistence of many prominent Framers, most notably, George Mason.
It really puzzles me that you admire the Framers but reject the tool they provided to deal with precisely the situation we are now in: A bloated, over-reaching, and over-bearing national government which is incapable of curbing its own power.
Odd position for a libertarian.
Do you really believe that? Then why all the fuss over deficits, debt, Obamacare, EPA regulations, Open Borders and on and on and on. Why do you think the Dems got their butts handed to them in the last election cycle? Because people are happy with the size and scope of the government? That’s utterly illogical Fred.
Well, the people that vote in off year elections aren’t happy. A Constitutional Convention on the other hand, would likely be seized on by liberals far more than even a Presidential election. I’m not saying I agree with Fred that we should fear a convention, but I see where he’s coming from.
It’s not a convention. We can’t have another constitutional convention. It’s a process to hold amendments. There is no way it can get highjacked by liberals when republicans control the majority of the state legislatures. And we get to vote too.
Look, who is going to make up this convention? What would be their mandate?
If anything, it’s going to reflect the make up and priorities of the political class. Which means they’ll vote for the same crap that we have now, minus all those annoying citizen rights, and checks and balances.
No thanks! I’m sorry, but it’s not worth the risk to me.
So, we cannot use Article V’s COS to address our runaway Federal government because a proposed amendment Harry Reid could not get through even one chamber–the chamber he controlled–might somehow get through the COS which is prohibited from even considering said amendment.
Even Houdini didn’t tie himself in so many unnecessary knots. Were we to be so foolish as to do this, we’d certainly deserve the fate it occasioned upon us. Let’s hope saner heads prevail.
Look, just about everybody wants big government except for a few cranks like myself.
Progressives want big government as a safety net. Republicans want big government in the form of absurd military overspending. The whole political class wants the War on Drugs. State and local governments want more free money. Everybody who gets a check from Uncle Sugar wants to keep riding the gravy train. And the public at large wants national parks, NASA, interstate highways, Social Security, Medicare, and a thousand other “free” programs.
Because the risk associated with the current path we are on is lower than the risk you foresee from using the Constitutional tool available to us? Really?
That’s because you don’t know anything about it. I say that respectfully, but it’s the truth. Do you think that when George Mason decided that this particular mechanism needed to be in the Constitution, that it was because he thought the circumstances would be any different than they are now?
The states propose the language in the amendments. That language must be identical across all fields. After the majority of the states vote on the language it’s sent to congress to be administered for ratification. At that point it still has to be ratified.
Until it all collapses. Then what? You are thinking about the insiders. That’s a far cry from “Everyone”. If everyone knew what the federal government was really up to, do you really think they would be for it?
Count me as a strong supporter of Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments. The effort to call a convention of the states is pure upside.
One point I haven’t seen made is the pro-constitutional incentive of the mere effort to call a COS. As more and more states vote in favor, the likelihood increases that the federal government will behave more constitutionally. Right now, the Obama administration position on such matters amounts to “What are you going to do about it?” A growing vote tally in favor of a COS is the long-term answer.
Consider also that the Democrats will no longer be able to bottle up reform by flooding the zone inside the Washington Beltway. The critical action will move to the 50 states–well, 49 actually, California being a lost cause–where conservatives are far stronger than in the District of Columbia.
And I fully expect Congress will attempt to head off any looming COS with reform amendments of its own–if it’s going to happen anyway, why not get the credit while preserving as much of your own power as possible?