The fictional runaway Philly Con-Con is conveniently located on the first excerpt linked above.
Posted on 12/12/2013 5:30:22 AM PST by dontreadthis
What Mark Levin says in “The Liberty Amendments” in support of an Article V convention is not true.1
On one side of this controversy are those who want to restore our Constitution by requiring federal and State officials to obey the Constitution we have; or by electing ones who will. We show that the Oath of Office at Art. VI, last clause, requires federal 2 and state officials to support the Constitution. This requires them to refuse to submit to – to nullify – acts of the federal government which violate the Constitution. This is how they “support” the Constitution!
We note that the Oath of Office requires obedience to the Constitution alone. The Oath does not require obedience to persons, to any agency of the federal government, or to any federal court.
We understand that resistance to tyranny is a natural right – and it is a duty.
We have read original writings of our Framers and know what our Framers actually told the States to do when the federal government violates the Constitution: Nullification of the unlawful act is among the first of the recommended remedies – not one of which is “amendment of the Constitution”. 3
(Excerpt) Read more at publiushuldah.wordpress.com ...
It does;t make sense in the initial read. Levin has the true manner in which we can and MUST take our country back. This yob hasn’t a clue
What, this again? Nullification is not up for debate, c’mon.
Levin’s plan is constitutional. Nullification is not.
I agree, but I am still in the process of understanding and formulating my logic and arguments.
I am trying to reconcile this article by Schlafly:
http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/article-v-future.html
any thoughts on that?
We jack our hands in the air, but never are we TAUGHT how to "support and defend the Constitution". Most of your career you are drilled to obey rders. Then you get 10 seconds of repeating an oath when you enter, and at every reenlistment. Not exactly realistic, and it's no different in federal service.
There is no practical training on how to support/defend the Constitution: it's left up to interpretation.
For that reason we must AMEND.
What you say is a fact, and is not why I posted this.
I am trying to explore the arguments against an Article V convention so as to strengthen my argument for it.
eg: http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/article-v-future.html
yes, I agree, and this wasn’t the best blog to post for what I’m trying to get at. I’m interested in looking at the arguments against an Article V convention in order to strengthen my own ability to defend it.
This may be a better example:
http://www.eagleforum.org/publications/column/article-v-future.html
Well a couple of arguments are the sheer impossibility of such a convention happening, and the probability that nothing would be ratified even if it was held. This county is almost hopelessly divided. There are 26 states that went for Obama last election. Only 17 are needed to block the Article V convetion to begin with. Only 13 are needed to block any amendments. The math is against it.
Article V does not bypass Congress at all. Amendment 17 bypasses the states, in fact, where the Senate is supposed to be the body that represents them in DC. Nowhere in Amendment V does it say that Congress has the power to deny the applications of two thirds of the states or deny the calling of a convention.
I think that the possibility of nullification is one reason why the Dems employed the nuclear option in order to pack the DC Federal Appeals Court. Which is the main court where regulatory challenges are heard prior to being escalated to the Supreme Court.
So the process would be for states to nullify, the Feds to sue and the Dem majority on the Appeals Court to rule in favor of the Feds and direct the states to do what they’re told to do.
The truth is that the functional ability of the states to nullify without triggering a Constitutional crisis ended with the 16th and 17th Amendments. Without the ability to delay and/or deny tax payments (at least the portion the Fed required from the states as opposed to from Tarriffs, etc) and Senators with a vested institutional interest in being very pro states rights, the states have a very limited set of tools to choose from here.
Very good essay, and it encapsulates very well my own fear of a “runaway convention.” I described the outcome of such a CC in my second novel, “Foreign Enemies And Traitors.”
/ / / /
“Tell me something, Doug. You’re obviously a smart guy. I’ve been out of the country for seven years. What the hell happened to America? I always thought Americans would fight to keep their freedom. What happened? How could Americans just roll over and give up their rights?”
“Well, we didn’t just ‘give up’ our rights. It wasn’t like that. Not at all. It’s more like they were stolen in broad daylight, at the constitutional convention.”
Carson asked, “How did that happen? I was down in the Caribbean then. American news wasn’t so big down there. Panama was going through its own troubles, and I was keeping a low profile. I didn’t have cable TV, that’s for sure.”
“I’ll tell you what happened—I watched it happen. When the convention was over, that’s when we knew that the old America was gone. It was over. Finished.”
“The convention was in Philadelphia, right?”
Right. I was in Baltimore when it happened, but it was televised wall-to-wall. On television, the talking heads called it the con-con, like it was a big joke or something. Maybe constitutional convention was too hard to spell, or maybe it took them too long to say it. Too many syllables. You know—time is money. I think a lot of the people behind the convention couldn’t even pronounce it, much less spell it, so it just became the con-con.”
“It was two years ago?”
“Yeah, two years ago in September. You have to understand how bad things already were, even before the earthquakes, and before the big hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast. Even back then, the economy was so bad that people were calling it the Greater Depression. People were desperate. And not just welfare types—I’m talking about solid middle class citizens. Or formerly middle class, like my family. Nouveau poor, we called it. I think people were ready to try just about anything to get the economy moving. Nothing the government tried was working; everything was in a downward spiral. We were still using blue bucks then, what they called ‘New Dollars.’ Banks were failing left and right, only the Fed wouldn’t let them fail—they pumped in trillions of dollars in new money to keep them open. Nobody wanted to hear that it might take years to unwind the economic mess we were in. That it took us decades to ruin the economy, and it would take a long time to fix it. Everybody wanted a quick fix, like pulling a rabbit out of a magic hat. But everything the president and Congress tried just made things worse. Especially printing so much new money.”
Doug set his rifle barrel back down on the table and continued. “The country was already a mess, and that was undeniable. Everybody and his brother were proposing constitutional amendments, supposedly to fix the economy, or make everything fair for the poor, or whatever. That’s how Congress came up with thirty-four state legislatures calling for amendments. There were seven or eight totally different amendment proposals, but it didn’t matter. Once Congress had thirty-four states on record proposing amendments, they went for it. I think they were just waiting for the chance. Once they had thirty-four states, it only took a 51 percent vote in Congress to call for the convention.”
“Congress? I don’t understand. What do they have to do with the convention?” asked Carson.
“Everything, under Article Five. It all came down to Article Five of the old constitution. Congress runs the whole show for constitutional conventions.”
“It does? I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, well, join the club. That was a major surprise to almost everybody, since it had never happened before. Not in over two hundred years, since it was written. So nobody knew much about Article Five,” said Doug.
“I guess that changed in a hurry.”
“You’re not kidding. It was shock therapy. Especially when the Poor People’s Party marched through Baltimore. There were already about a million of them camping out in Washington on the National Mall before the convention. When they took off walking to Philly, it was like a dam bursting. That was on Labor Day. Mile after mile of people with flags, signs, drums, musical bands on truck, everything you can imagine. Police cars were escorting them, leading them up I-95. They closed the northbound lanes of 95 for something like twenty miles, for the whole time it took them to walk to Philly. They kept moving that closed section of 95 north, to keep up with the marchers. There was nothing else on television, practically. It took them two days just to get through Baltimore, and when they came through, they spread out like locusts. I was in Baltimore then, back in my mother’s house. I’d quit college and gotten my draft notice. I was waiting to report for basic training.”
Doug took a sip of his instant coffee, and went on. “Naturally, our own locals got into the spirit and joined the march. They took whatever they wanted from any stores along the way, and the police just watched. There was nothing they could do anyway, or it would have caused the biggest riot in history. It was legalized looting, that’s all it was. Legalized looting, all over Baltimore. ‘Redistributing the wealth,’ they called it. We stayed locked in our house and watched it all on television. It would have been suicide to go out and see it in person.”
“So it was, ah...racially polarized?” asked Carson.
“Extremely. Everything was black and white when they came marching through Baltimore. Blacks marching, and whites hiding. I never saw anything like it in my life. Well, not until Memphis, but that was after the earthquakes.”
Carson asked, “How far is it from Washington to Philly? Two hundred miles?”
“That’s about right. It took two weeks for them to make it all the way, and when they arrived, the constitutional convention was just starting. Perfect timing. What a coincidence, right? It was all planned in advance, that’s obvious now. They held the convention in Philly’s new sports arena, the one that was named for a bank. I think that bank is out of business; I don’t know what they call it now. The delegates were down on the floor, and the rest of the stands were full of twenty thousand ‘spectators.’ Yelling and screaming like maniacs?and outside it was worse. They said there were over a million of the Poor People’s Party in Philly by then, coming from everywhere, not just Washington. Probably another million just from the Philadelphia area. They were banging on buckets and pans, turning over cars, barricading streets and smashing store windows. They kept interviewing the rabble-rousers on TV—it was like pouring gasoline on fire. ‘No Justice, No Peace,’ that’s all you heard. That was one of the big mantras. They called the looting ‘street reparations.’ They said if they didn’t get the economic justice amendment, they’d burn the city down. It looked like they would, too. Every street in downtown Philly looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve, that’s how crowded it was.”
“Jeez, that had to be pretty rough, with that many people packed into downtown,” said Carson. “There couldn’t have been enough public bath-rooms.”
“Almost every store and restaurant was broken open. Needing to use the restrooms was always a good excuse to force their way in. That, and needing food and drinking water. And after that, everything was looted.”
“And the police didn’t stop it?”
“They couldn’t stop it. How could they?” asked Doug. “The police just stayed back on the edges and tried to herd them. Even that didn’t work. A mob that big makes its own rules.”
“Like a human tidal wave.”
“Exactly. A human tsunami. So, with that mega-mob outside the arena, you can guess what kinds of radicals were being let in to fill the twenty thousand seats. The real cream of the crop. It was a total farce. That’s when they started to call it the ‘kangaroo convention’ on talk radio. That was back when we still had AM talk radio.”
Carson asked, “What happened to talk radio?”
“Two things. First, a couple of years ago Congress passed the so-called ‘fairness’ laws. That meant that every point of view on a radio station had to be balanced by another radio host or by other callers from the other side. It got incredibly complicated. They literally had to count how many minutes were said for this and for that on every subject. Trying to keep up with the fairness laws made talk radio a money loser, so most stations went to sports or music. Then Congress passed a law against ‘hate speech on the public airwaves.’ Anybody could take a radio station to court for just about anything that they claimed was hate speech. They’d cherry-pick a left-wing judge and jury, and it was a slam-dunk every time. After a few million-dollar judgments, the last talk radio stations threw in the towel. Now radio is practically all music and sports, with happy talk in between government PSAs?public service announcements.”
“This must really be up your alley, if you were majoring in communications.”
“Yeah, I picked a great time to choose that career path, huh? Now all we get on television and the radio is government propaganda.”
“I’ve heard it,” said Carson. “We could get Nashville radio at Zack’s house at night. So, you were up to the start of the convention.”
“Right. So to start it off, the Aztlan Coalition said they wouldn’t vote for any other amendments unless they got their regional autonomy deal first. That was the Southwestern Justice and Compensation Amendment. That was the first amendment they voted on, and it passed on a voice vote. Next, it was reparations for slavery. Five hundred thousand New Dollars for every African-American man, woman and child. Right after that, it was reparations for ‘survivors of the Native American genocide.’ Another half million for everybody with Indian blood.”
“How was that paid?” asked Carson in astonishment. “Where did the money for all of that come from?”
“Didn’t matter,” Doug replied. “It was just instant money from the Treasury—or the Federal Reserve. What’s the difference? Ten trillion brand new blue bucks, right out of thin air. The checks came in the mail, or the money was just direct-deposited straight into their bank accounts. It was all just electronic digits, but it was real money just the same. It was just as spendable as any other money.”
“And that brought on the hyperinflation?”
“Among other things, like fraud on a scale never seen before in human history. People were collecting reparation payments right and left under false identities. I think there were about a million double-dippers who claimed they were black and Indian—but it didn’t matter. Congress said that the reparations money would stimulate the economy. It would ‘prime the pump and even the playing field’ at the same time. It was ‘the mother of all stimulus packages.’ That was another of those cliches you heard all the time. The convention was already way out of control by the time they passed reparations for slavery and the Indians.
“Next came the Freedom from Gun Violence Amendment, and that’s when the Second Amendment was annulled. So you see, we didn’t want any of it. Not regular Americans. We didn’t ever vote for it; it was all done at the con-con by mob rule. It was a complete circus by then; the kangaroo convention. But it didn’t matter what average Americans thought, the amendments all became law. They became the new constitution. When the Second Amendment was repealed, the delegates in the arena had a mass orgasm. We watched it all on TV. It was surreal, like a bad dream you get after food poisoning.”
http://enemiesforeignanddomestic.com/index.php?page=excerpts
Continue reading about the fictional runaway Con-Con at the “FEAT Excerpt Part 1” link above
That is argument for using the amendment process to STRENGTHEN the Constitution, as opposed to CHANGING the Constitution, which I believe is the heart of the purpose of an Article V convention.
Strengthening implies a firm understanding of original intent, and the first order of business of a Convention of States would be to agree upon that purpose. Without that agreement, it seems to me that it would be useless (and detractors would say dangerous)to proceed.
I think if you will read what Levin had to say yesterday after his radio interiew with Paul Ryan it appears Levin has come to the party. He has finally realized that we cannot avoid a total economic collapse due to the fact that the legislaors will never step up and cut spending.
An Article V convention is not going to happen and its not the way to go. The 10th ammendment allows the states to exert their sovereignty and they are already beginning to do this. SC is preparing to toally opt out of Obamacare and exempt all SC citizens. Several states have pre-empted gun control. You will see others tell the EPA to take a hike on power plant closings as soon as the blackouts start probably next year.
As the wheels come off the bus and they are starting to the sovereign states will start to go their own way. Whether we will stay together as the USA or break up into regions remains to be seen. But Article V is not going to happen.
Yes, that is the reality. However, it may not be necessary for a Convention of States to actually reach fruition with a ratified amendment. The process itself has merit and potential impact.
Either we take control of this rogue government, or it is going to eat us, our country and every single thing in it.
That is all.
The fictional runaway Philly Con-Con is conveniently located on the first excerpt linked above.
Basically, our constitutional form of government depends on two things: 1) Our elected/appointed officials have to be of good moral character and want to do the right thing and 2) the electorate has to hold our elected officials accountable by voting them out of office when they don’t behave. Nothing will improve until those two things start happening.
I agree, and the exercise of State Sovereignty is relatively easier to envision happening than a much more cumbersome Article V convention. Nevertheless, there is momentum building among the States nationally for a convention, just as momentum builds within each State for the exercise of sovereignty, so I see no downside to concurrent processes even if a Convention of States does not reach full fruition.
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