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.
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?
