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Lucretia and I held the first "classroom" for PLU (Power Line University) yesterday, with 110 people ultimately tuning in live for our first formal session on The Federalist Papers. We had a couple of technical difficulties—for some reason we kept failing to get the Chat window working right—and we had some hiccups admitting some live questions and comments from viewers, but we hope to have these ironed out for our next session which will likely be mid-week next week. Anyway, here is the podcast version for those of you who weren't able to join us live.
Our first session got off to a bit of a slow start—like the Federalist Papers themselves—with a look at numbers 1 - 9. (We had planned to include the famous Federalist 10 in this first session, but are putting it off to the next session.) The first few papers review at length the case against the disunity of the infant nation if the Constitution was not ratified and the United States split into three or four regional confederacies. Things really get hopping with Hamilton's high-spirited Federalist 9, which is where we had to break off for the day.
Our tag line for this podcast series is "Never let college get in the way of your education," and we're glad to see that our live audience had a wide age span, starting with our youngest viewer, Theodore Ian (age four months), who is clearly enthralled by our scintillating commentary—proof that it is never too early to get the kids started on a sound education in the Right PrinciplesTM.
We did share some slides of the text we were considering, and read aloud most of the passages, but not all of them, so if you want to see the session, including the text slides instead of just listening to it in your car or on a walk, you can see the session on YouTube here. (Another thing we will try to arrange going forward is sharing the Power Point slide decks in these podcast links.)
Stay tuned for announcements of the schedule for future PLU seminars here on Ricochet or over on Power Line.
Steve Hayward
"Lucretia"
Discussion (4)
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There was a question towards the end that prompted jokes about the low quality people who would be present at a new constitutional convention. What, if anything, do you think should be on the agenda? Or do we need to go back to the beginning and refresh what is already there?
PODCAST ORGANIZATION
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At the top of the list for conservatives who support an Article V convention is a balanced budget amendment, term limits, a line-item veto for the president, and a two-thirds vote requirement for all tax increases. (Reagan called for these amendments back in the 1980s.)
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Those seem like good things to address. My suspicion is that those items will not change the unease I (maybe we), have more broadly. For example @Lucretia's frustration with the lack of action at the border; and other more cultural things that some of us point fingers at and cry "Federalist Papers, the Bill of Rights BUT THE CONSTITUTION!".
If nothing less, implementation of the Reagan amendments would only kick into gear the post modern creative genius of the progressives to find ways of circumventing everything.
My layman's opinion is that an Article V convention in the end, even if we get everything "we" wanted, would turn out to be counterproductive to the things we thought it would solve. Thus maybe not productive to expend energy on an Article V convention.
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