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(From my next novel)

“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 it 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, or just GD2. 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. The Federal Reserve dropped interest rates to zero percent, but even that didn’t help. 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. We were still using blue bucks then, what they called ‘New Dollars.’ They printed that new money up to the sky, up to the moon. 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 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 34 state legislatures calling for a convention. There were seven or eight totally different amendment proposals, but it didn’t matter. Once Congress had 34 states on record proposing amendments, they went for it. Oh, I think they were just waiting for the chance. Once they had 34 states, it only took a 51% 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 220 years. 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 trucks—everything you can imagine. Police cars were escorting them, leading them up I-95. They closed the northbound lanes of I-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 own 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 the Spectrum sports arena. The delegates were down on the floor, and the rest of the stands were full of ‘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. Probably another million just from Philadelphia. They were banging on buckets and pans, turning over cars, barricading streets and smashing 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 ‘collecting 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. There couldn’t have been enough public bathrooms,” said Carson.
“Every store and restaurant was broken open. Needing to use the toilets was always a good excuse to force their way in. That, and needing food and drinking water. 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 Spectrum, you can guess what kinds of radicals were being let in to fill the 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,’ in their opinion. They’d cherry-pick a left-wing judge and jury, in the right jurisdiction, 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 nice happy-talk in between government PSA’s—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 constitutional convention.”
“Right. Anyway, 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 clichés 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 Spectrum had a mass orgasm. We watched it all on TV. It was surreal, like a bad dream you get after food poisoning.”
Carson asked, “What did the gun amendment ban?”
“Just about every legal firearm that was left. After the stadium massacre seven years ago, the semi-auto rifles were already outlawed. The ones they called assault weapons.”
“I remember that,” said Carson. “I was here for that one.”
“Under the Freedom From Gun Violence Amendment, there are no more privately owned handguns, none. Um, except for the police. The police and the military. And no pump or auto-loading shotguns. Only single shot and double-barreled shotguns—and you need to get a federal license to keep one in your house. Oh, and you have to take a federal firearms safety course and pass a background check to get your license. If they don’t like your background—meaning your politics—no license.”
“Gun control was never about safety: it was just about defanging and declawing ordinary Americans,” said Carson. “To make it safe for the police, in a police state.”
“Exactly. And that wasn’t all,” continued Doug. “No rifle scopes…only assassins need them, right? No rifles bigger than thirty caliber, period. And all of the bolt and lever action rifles have to be licensed and registered, just like the shotguns. Everything that’s registered has to be kept in officially approved gun safes, and they’re subject to inspection at any time. They even have to be kept disassembled, with the bolts stored separately in another room. And God help you if they come in to inspect, and they’re not ‘properly stored’ according to the law.”
“What about ammunition?”
“You have to fill out about a yard of paperwork and get police approval to buy a box of hunting ammunition, and then it’s taxed around 500%. And you have to turn in your fired brass before you can buy more ammo. Oh, and forget about reloading—that’s illegal. You can’t even own gunpowder—that’s a ‘bomb-making material’ now.”
“And this was all in the gun amendment?” asked Carson.
“Hell yes. I think the FFGVA is something like forty pages long.”
“And American shooters just went along with it?” Carson asked with a look of incredulity.
“No, not most of them. I mean…oh hell, I don’t know. I didn’t believe any of the polls I read on it. But you’d be amazed by the number of so-called hunters and sportsmen they found to say it was all actually quite reasonable. They were on TV all the time, telling shooters to be reasonable, and comply with the new laws. They could still go hunting, and a bit of inconvenience was a small price to pay for public safety.”
“They can always find sellouts and traitors.”
“Yessir they can,” Doug agreed. “But any way you cut it, the Second Amendment was finished, dead and buried after the convention.”
Carson sighed, and slowly shook his head. “The end of two centuries of American gun rights.”
“Yep, the end.” Doug smiled, and patted the lower receiver of the AR-15 carbine lying across the table. “Legally, anyway. That is, if you consider anything that came out of that abortion that was born in Philadelphia to be legal.”
“I take it you don’t.”
“Nope, I don’t, not at all. But the con-con didn’t end with the gun amendment. The economic amendment was the last one. That was on the final day of the convention. It was a rubber stamp, another voice vote. By then the con-con was like a religious revival meeting, so of course the EJDA passed. That’s what they call the Economic Justice and Democracy Amendment, the EJDA. It was another mass orgasm in the Spectrum. We were in shock by then, watching it on television at home. It all happened so fast! Only a few months before the con-con, everybody thought the Poor People’s Party was a joke. We thought the constitutional convention would never happen, and even if it did, it wouldn’t really count, somehow. But it did, and nobody’s laughing now.”
“What’s this economic amendment do?” asked Carson.
“The EJDA guarantees jobs for everybody; it guarantees ‘a living wage,’ guarantees ‘affordable’ housing, free health care, free college, free child care… Almost any freebie or handout you can think of, it’s in the EJDA. Basically it’s communism, written into the constitution. Believe it or not, they sold it as the best way to fix the economy. The new constitution was going to get us out of the depression, and make life fair for everybody. With the new constitution, the President could enact the ‘New New Deal,’ and get us out of the depression. Fat chance! That’s like taking arsenic to cure a stomach ache.”
“Back up a minute,” said Carson. “How did they ratify these amendments? What does the old constitution say? Don’t they need something like three quarters of the states to ratify an amendment?”
“That’s what we thought,” replied Doug, “But they used the back door clause. In Article Five, it says new amendments have to be approved by three fourths of the state legislatures, ‘or by conventions in three fourths thereof.’ That was the fuzzy part, the part nobody could really explain. That became just about the most famous sentence in the constitution. But what the hell does it mean? Who makes up these state conventions? Who nominates the delegates, what are the rules, and where do they hold them? There’s nothing in Article Five that spells it out. You’d see ten so-called constitutional experts on television, and you’d get ten different explanations. It was all up to the Congress to determine what conventions in three fourths thereof meant. At least, according to the Congress it was.”
“It sounds crazy,” said Carson, disgustedly. “It sounds like something that would happen in Argentina or Mexico. Making up the rules as they go along.”
“It was crazy, especially because the whole thing started with eight Western states that wanted a states-rights amendment. It was mostly over coal and gas revenues, and water rights. They wanted to cut back on federal control of their resources, and then they were joined by seven southern states. That was the original group of fifteen states. But pretty soon lots of blue states jumped on the band wagon, when they thought they might be able to turn a convention in their direction. Nobody really thought it would actually happen, it seemed so far-fetched—but in less than a year there were 34 states calling for a constitutional convention. For six or seven totally different amendments, mind you. Nobody saw the train wreck coming. Well, almost nobody—the radical Democrats in Congress saw it. They wanted it…they saw the potential. It was a setup, a scam from day one. A big scam to turn the country hard-core socialist in one big jump. We all know that now. It was all supposed to get us out of the depression. But by the time we figured out what they were up to, it was too late to stop it. Congress had complete control of how to run the convention, and that meant the Democrats. The train had left the station, and it couldn’t be stopped. Then the Poor People’s Party was organized, and the next thing you know, we had Philadelphia. They held these so-called ‘state ratifying conventions’ right there in the Spectrum in Philadelphia, right there after the constitutional convention. It was such a joke! That’s why we called it the kangaroo convention.”
“And the Supreme Court didn’t stop it?”
Doug said, “Oh, the Supreme Court—I forgot that one. There are twelve justices on the Supreme Court now. That was another amendment: twelve justices instead of nine. The President nominated the three new justices as soon as the convention was over, after the amendments were passed. Congress confirmed them the same day the President nominated them. The old Supreme Court with nine justices was our last hope: that they’d throw the whole thing out. Just invalidate the whole thing. But they didn’t stop it. They voted five to four that the Supreme Court had no standing to overrule the convention results. The majority said that Article Five conventions are up to Congress. That was the last ruling by the nine-judge Supreme Court. Most people think the five liberals on the old court liked the new constitution better. They agreed with the new amendments, so that’s why they voted to stay out of it. Now that there are twelve justices, the liberals win everything. Three of the conservative justices resigned in protest, but that just gave the President three more seats to fill. Since the convention, it’s like living in Venezuela, or Russia. It’s Alice in Wonderland.”
“What about Congress?”
“What about Congress?” Doug asked back. “The Democrats had unbreakable majorities. The whole convention was their idea. Oh my God, the Democrats were all in hog heaven—and the Republicans were as gutless as ever. The RINOs rolled over for the new constitution, most of them anyway. They never had the numbers to stop it. You know, as long as they can keep their snouts in the hog trough, that’s all they really care about. A few Republicans challenged the basic legality of the con-con, but they were shouted down and called fascists and racists, all the usual stuff. They took an unholy beating in the media. So most of them caved in, and shut up.”
“Typical,” agreed Carson.
“Very. It works every time with RINOs. Growl at them, call them racists or homophobes, and they’ll run for cover with their tails between their legs. They just want to stay in Congress—it’s like being royalty. I think most of the RINOs in Congress like being in the permanent minority—it’s easier. Just keep your head down, shuffle along, make your votes, and go to A-list millionaire parties every night of the week.” Doug spat on the ground. “Bunch of losers.”