I wonder what crime Obama will have to commit to move enough state legislators off bottom dead center and call for a convention to propose amendments.
The question I have asked over the the last two years before Mark Levin wrote the Liberty Amendments and actually before he was onboard with Article V (he used to think similar to Schlafly) is that if an Article V is so risky for conservatives to engage, then why are liberals not going all out to get an Article V COS launched? The answer is obvious, they haven’t a hope of getting any of their own amendments proposed let alone ratified.
The above question was asked at least a couple of times in this debate and with mixed answers.
The beauty of Art. V is that it counts by states and not by delegate totals. Therefore, Wyoming is equivalent in power to California, Kansas is equivalent to New York, etc.
Schlafly is clearly relying on fear and hyperbole to make his points but throughout the course of the debate he actually does make some good points that Art V supporters should consider. For example, he recounts how chaos and disorder carried an issue of taking God out of the democrat platform in 2012 when in fact the dems in the quorum wanted it, the speaker became confused and passed it anyway. He makes the point that if any mistake is made in a disorderly convention, that the media will make it difficult to put the horses back in the barn so to speak. The lesson to be learned is that order must be tightly controlled and rules strictly adhered to in the COS.
So this debate is good because we can learn new things from it.
But then he says at 49:47 that liberals want a COS because then they can take it over. Excuse me, why don’t they just organize a COS themselves? Why is it left to conservatives to go first? It doesn’t make sense.
Then Schlafly answers the question of why is Art V in the Constitution and he tries lamely to attribute it to George Mason who he said opposed the Constitution. This is an answer that would garner an ‘F’ in any political science class. Farris rightly points out that Art V was unanimously adopted with George Washington presiding over and voting for Art. V. Would Schlafly denigrate George Washington? His tactic is one similar to Alinsky in that he tries to denigrate Art. V by focusing on George Mason alone. This is clearly wrong. So Schlafly clearly fails here.
But there is one major contradiction of Schlafly that was not pointed out by Farris at about time 53:35 into the video:
Schlafly goes on and on about how the liberals will take over the COS. “Who’s going to stop them” he asks repeatedly (49:58). But then at about 53:35 the question is asked when should Art. V be used? So Schlafly concocts an example of when martial law is imposed and elections are cancelled. To which I would challenge Schlafly “Really now? Who’s going to stop those that impose martial law and cancel elections? Who’s going to stop them?” I would use the same argument he just minutes before used; Schlafly contradicts himself within minutes. He can’t have it both ways.