The Craziness of a ConCon [Constitutional Convention]

The Market-Ticker ^ | Sept. 21, 2014 | Karl Denninger

[INVAR]

Oh, stop your nonsense. The alleged "oligarchy" still submits itself to elections, still submits itself to judicial review. Just because you happen to disagree with the results of those elections or disagree with the results of judicial review, does not mean that we have an oligarchy or that the oligarchy is behaving extraconstitutional.

Then we have absolutely nothing more to discuss.

Good luck with your crusade.

[Sherman Logan]

Thus, the federal government cannot abridge the right to keep and bear arms but states and localities can.

"No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

If the right to "keep and bear arms" isn't one of the "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," what is?

14A changed the relationship between citizens, the states and the federal government a great deal from that of the original constitution, probably more than those who passed and ratified it intended it to.

[Sherman Logan]

Your math is absolutely correct. However, those 13 houses that you place reliance on to prevent liberal amendments from passing are equally applicable to keeping any conservative amendments from passing.

The amendment process was intentionally designed to be usable only when there was an overwhelming national consensus, both by population and by region. Which is simply not there for any of the remedies proposed by conservatives.

In fact, most of those initiatives could not win a simple majority referendum, much less be ratified as an amendment, which is at least an order of magnitude more difficult.

[Nuc 1.1]

An Amendment that is ignored, struck down by an activist judiciary or simply decreed to be void by the president, has no power.

A good statement that speaks to the heart of our present situation. This is the primary issue a CoS IMHO must deal with. The purpose of Mark Levin's amendment I mentioned is to provide the states a means to nullify federal edicts via a super majority of states as voted upon by the respective state legislatures. Can this method reign in the Feds? Maybe, if enough states vote to nullify. Will the feds follow the outcome? Maybe. If they don't we have at least tried to resolve our problems peacefully and we are no worse off then we are presently and we may argue we are a bit better off because the tyrants are further out in the open. Good reply FReeper. We need a bit more of thoughtful replies like this on FR.

[Nuc 1.1]

It is not the right to bear arms that is in question. I fully support the right to keep and bear arms, at all levels. The statement is that the constitution specifies the allowed federal activity and is intended to limit federal intrusion into our lives. I completely concur with your statement concerning the 14th. The progressive marxists have really made a mess of our nation.

[Da Bilge Troll]

When you say “ConCon” I know you’re spewing PropagandaPropaganda.

[SatinDoll]

ConCon is in the title and original article which, I suspect, you haven’t read.

As for the propaganda part just what part of all this do you mean is propaganda?

[Hostage]

Again it is not a Con Con, it is an Assembly of States organized for amending the current Constitution and NOT for drawing up a new Constitution.

An Assembly of States is not convened for the purpose of presenting a list of crimes. Its purpose is to propose amendments which requires 2/3’s of states to vote for passage and then to be considered for ratification by 3/4’s of all states.

[nathanbedford]

You are absolutely correct, the arithmetic cuts both ways, although more in favor of conservatives but only moderately so. That means that we are at a stalemate situation as far as Article Vis concerned but that means that the left prevails as long as the situation is static because they control the electoral process, the judiciary, the media etc. If our politics proceed as they have, we will drift ever more to the left, ever deeper in debt, ever weaker abroad, ever more divided at home.

The whole idea ofArticle V is to move the game to a new board where the rules favor conservatives more and that new game will occur in the state legislatures. But to break the deadlock we will need some sort of a "Black Swan" event to energize the electorate and breakthrough the inertia which we unfortunately read on these boards even from conservatives and to overcome leftist minority in state legislatures.

As I said in another post, luck goes to the prepared and we have very good reason to believe that some sort of a reckoning cannot be long delayed. While Nathan Bedford's Maxim, "failed socialism does not result in reform but in more socialism," is often true it is also possible that the country will react in common sense against what has been done to us and actually turn toward conservative reforms.

All we can do is try. If we do not try, what will we tell our kids as they survey the wreckage of their country?

[Sherman Logan]

I agree with the severity of the problem. I disagree strongly that there is some sort of political maneuver that can fix it.

In fact, I think the fixed idea conservatives have that such issues are at root a political question is our biggest problem.

A democratic system such as ours is intended to give the people what they want. In the long run, they will get it.

Therefore the BIG issue, by which are others are miniscule, is what the people want. Influencing THAT, in the long run, is what determines where our society is headed.

What people want is simply not affected much by the political process. It is determined culturally, especially in popular culture.

Unfortunately, conservatives have for at least 40 years abandoned the cultural battleground, leaving it to liberals/leftists/progressives. Not surprisingly, if you don’t fight you can’t win.

The political mess we are now in is the result of that 40+ years of not fighting back. That it has taken so long for this mess to evolve is a measure of how strong our cultural capital used to be. But it’s pretty much gone at this point.

To my mind, there simply is no “political” fix at this point. The battle can only be fought and eventually won on the cultural level. As the late, great Breitbart said, “Politics is downstream of culture.”

Unless and until the American people desire to remodel the Constitution in a conservative direction, calling a con-con to do so simply cannot have any positive effects, though it certainly could have negative ones.

[precisionshootist]

Yes it's a horrible idea. Those framers of our Constitution sure were a bunch idiots! What were they thinking!

/s

[nathanbedford]

I don't think we have much to disagree about. We both say the culture trumps politics and therefore a political fix is not the panacea.

I do not advance Article V as a fix but as an opportunistic tool which has a chance of passage only with a cataclysmic event of some sort which alters the politics for a season. The passage of such amendments will temporarily change how the political game is played and that is to the advantage of conservatives but the secular drift cannot long be frustrated by a political fix. A fix, even a temporary fix, is not to be despised if we recall that the original Constitution spared a civil war for only 80 years.

We do not disagree for one second that conservatives have quit the battlefield in the culture wars. They fight the wrong fights the wrong way in my view. But even more important, the institutions which wage those wars have been utterly relinquished to the left and so when conservatives engage in the political theater it is already too late.

However it is not entirely clear how center-left the country is as opposed to center-right. We know that when it comes to breaking the middle-class Rice bowl, such as touching Social Security, there is a third rail. Americans want their Social Security but they also say they want balanced budgets. On the other hand, "social issues" like homosexuality are not so clear. We ought not to forget that there are consistent polls that show a plurality if not a majority of Americans regard themselves to be conservative-if they even know what that means.

So it may be to some degree that the electorate is instinctively center-right on many issues but expresses itself at the polls in a centerleft vote because of the influence of the media, academia, and other institutions. This might just be wishful thinking on my part and the part of people like Ronald Reagan who voiced that opinion but who also made it prove out at the polls. The fact remains, however, that every election seems to make our situation more detached from the cultural drift of the country. Beyond the institutions which shape the culture, there is the matter of runaway immigration which certainly distorts everything.

It is from this line of thinking that we hear pundits tell us that it is not the conservative message that is wrong but the messenger. Of course, they point to Ronald Reagan as the kind of messenger needed to sell the conservative message. I am inclined to agree more with you, that every generation makes the conservative message a harder sell as the culture shifts beneath our feet.

In this context, I often try to identify on these threads where the tentacles of The Frankfurt School have insinuated themselves into the culture and perverted it.

The arithmetic of 13 legislatures out of 99, a majority of which are Republican, leads me to our only disagreement. I see no realistic downside risk in an Article V convention. If the nation is at such a risk, our problem will not be the nature of the document, that only counts to conservatives, it will be the reaction, whether left dominated all right dominated, to the global event which triggers the process. If the reaction is leftist, the constitutional changes will not be the cause of our problem but merely the present constitutional charade made explicit.

[Sherman Logan]

I’ll buy that.

I was perhaps projecting onto you views others have expressed. The notion that America is still the country it was in the 80s. Well, it isn’t and it won’t return to that without great effort.

We’ve been living off our cultural capital for at least 40 years, but that well is just about dry.

[Sherman Logan]

Not a particularly popular POV, but the first Amendment I’d like to see passed would be on making it somewhat easier to pass future amendments.

One significant reason, IMO, that the Constitution gets ignored is that very real needs cannot be addressed without an amendment, but such an amendment cannot be passed because it’s just too hard.

I think if amendments were somewhat easier to pass, it would make insisting people stick to the Constitution as amended easier.

[Dajjal]

ConCon bump