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Thanks for the ping. Listening now to the Hillsdale webcast.

Can I get removed please from this PING list. Thanks

Madison believed that power would accrete primarily to the Legislative branch. While congressional supremacy was the rule after the Civil War, presidents, courts and regulatory bureaucrats have taken most of the power in modern times. Madison even doubts the ability of a convention to correct the problems within a constitution if the people’s passions are raised to fever pitch. Is he right or wrong on this issue, and why?

Well, no one knows of course. I think people’s problem today with the idea of another convention is that the original convention was made up of a small group of mostly well intentioned people. Today, our leaders conspire against the common person, using their influence to take our money and distribute it as they see fit. Originally political power was misused for personal enrichment, export import companies, local banks, etc. Now the government's reach is much further into the details of our lives.

Leaders able to make a constitutional convention work, have the ability to make a legislature, presidency and court system work. We wouldn't be talking about this though if we had complete faith in our leaders. If our leaders today prove themselves chronically incapable of acting in a correct manner then how do we reconstitute a group of people able to re-write the constitution? Our state legislators simply don't have the ability of the founders. We would have to turn to people outside any government but they would only have theoretical ideas and today, we don't have the example of thirteen different countries to draw our experience from. Moreover no small group would have the consent of the governed.

Can we fix it? I don’t know but a quote from Reagan helps put it in perspective,

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

The thought about what is happening to us today is disheartening. Other than sensible people having their say, the only path I can think of is for the Federal government to spend itself into bankruptcy and then for individual states to bribe themselves out of the union in return for taking more than their fair share of the debt with them.