[Star Traveler]

To sum it up for me, the problem here has never been the Constitution, but rather the people. If the people cannot vote the right representatives in office, no amount of fiddling with the Constitution is going to make a difference.

My first point of change is with elections and the people in office and not the Constitution, because in reality all the Constitution is, is a piece of paper and nothing else, if the voters don’t have it in their heart. It starts with the voters and elections.

Another way to put it is, if one wanted to prove that a new constitution or an old constitution would be followed, one proves it by the voters and at the ballot box. If one can’t prove it there, they can’t prove it anywhere.

[nathanbedford]

Respectfully, I find two major flaws with your reasoning which I know expresses the best concerns of a conservative mind.

First, the idea that we must find the right people to rule over us was never shared by the framers as an exclusive remedy to tyranny. Although we have Adams' warning that a democracy requires virtuous people, the motivating premise among the framers was that men are inherently not virtuous, indeed, in the 18th century argot they are sinners and prone not only to committing sin but to misfeasance and corruption in office.

Hence the framers spent a whole summer concentrating all their energies and their vast knowledge of political philosophy of Locke and Montesquieu as well as the history of Rome and Greece to devise a system which would protect us from the failings of sinful leaders. That is why we have a Constitution so carefully constructed with separation of powers and checks and balances.

The framers never assumed that we would have good men governing over us or that the electorate would be wise enough to find them. They turned to the Constitution.

The impetus for the Article V movement is not so much that the voters at the ballot box have failed the government but that the government has failed the voters. In other words, our problem is not that majority will is being done but that an elite minority is frustrating the majority will.

This is done in innumerable ways. One need only look at the accretion of rulings from either the Supreme Court or from administrative agencies to recognize that an elite of very few, unelected judges and bureaucrats are ruling against the will of the majority.

One can hardly review the history of Obamacare, either by its cynical and corrupt method of passage or by way of its extraconstitutional implementation by the Obama administration and conclude that it represents the will of the people.

The examples are being made every day and the conclusion becomes more and more apparent that the elites have taken control, that they are immune from the will of the majority expressed at the ballot box, that the Constitution which was designed to prevent the state of affairs has been finally subverted.

For the very reasons I expressed in my first post on this thread, to believe that the ballot box will save the Republic is illusory.