No, that is not the premise of my reasoning.
The people do have the right, and the people have already outlined at the Federal level, in law, how that right is to be exercised. That's what the US Constitution is all about.
If it is not done through the amendment process, it is illegal, by definition, and by the direction of the people themselves through the ratification process, meaning the consent of the people.
So, we have the right, and at the federal level we have already defined how that right is to be exercised.
Now, my other point was that if the federal officials themselves begin circumventing the process (which all three branches of government have been doing for decades), then ultimately, like with the revolution, the people can resort to their natural right as outlined in the DOI to throw off such usurpations.
IMHO, the premise you are setting forth is that the people have the power to usurp the ratified, legal amenement process through their federal legislators that they themselves (the people) have ratified and directed those legislators to use. That, unless I am reading this wrong, is the fault I find. It's like the people saying...do it this way (the legal, ratified amendment process) and then turning around and telling their legislators that it is okay to violate it and break their oath. That leads, by affirmation, to what we already have...them breaking their oaths and circumventing the constitution, thinking that "the people will approve". They are trying to call this democracy...when this Republic was never intended to be a pure democracy in the least.
That may be the defacto state...but it is wrong, illegal and unconstitutional altogether.
Kris, if I am reading you right, I am understanding you to be saying that the people, through their God-given rights as ensured by the Constitution, essentially have the right to hand over to the federal government any of those individual (or states’) rights that they deem fit to hand over (although you appear to be distressed by the fact that that procedure has been taken to the extreme).
One of the (if not the) basic foundational underpinnings of the Constitution is the concept of enumerated powers. Our Founders were (justifiably) obsessed with spelling out, in specific, the – originally countable on the fingers of one hand – powers that were delegated to the federal government. Those powers were the ones that were envisioned as necessary by virtue of the need for large numbers of civilized people to live together, without posing a threat to one another, without being preyed upon by outside enemies, and to be able to preserve the ‘common good’ (without broadening that nebulous term so as to infringe upon individual liberties).
The people (i.e., the states, by virtue of republican representation) cannot abdicate any of their (God-given) liberties simply by passing laws declaring that they wish to do so. Article V of the Constitution must be invoked, and a Constitutional Amendment must be put in place.
Allow me a rather absurd analogy: I think a simplistic one would be having a judge, in a hypothetical family court dispute, declare that a child has vast and certain inalienable rights as a human being, but that his parents have the minimal, legally-prescribed overriding responsibilities to provide necessary food, shelter, discipline and education, by simple virtue of their age and relationship to the child. If the child then decides that he wishes his parents to sit in the classroom in his stead, or to regularly feed him nothing but French fries and soda, that child only need say so (after all, he has been given the personal freedom to do so, since doing so does not fall under the few enumerated powers granted by the court to his parents) -- and without petitioning the court for an addition to the powers granted his parents. That would be foolish, and contrary to the intent of the original court stipulation.
I believe that this entire debate (indeed, most of what is written on this forum) centers around the fact that the American government, over the past half century especially, has usurped many powers that were not enumerated it under the Constitution. The reasons it has been successful in doing so are many. Chief among them is a public ignorance of the Constitution, and a public willingness to allow those rights that were so fervently defended by our Founders to be abdicated via unconstitutional laws passed by the people’s representatives.
Holding fast to the amendment process, as it was originally defined and intended, would most likely have prevented the erosion of individual liberty, and the commensurate growth of federal tyranny. If not, then the erosion of liberty would have been minimal, and would have been evidence of either short-sightedness on the part of our Founders, or mass stupidity on the part of their descendents (with the latter being much more likely).
~ joanie