[Political Junkie Too]

The liberal states will do their best to stay away from the Mount Vernon preparatory gathering and hope this effort peters out.

This is a comment worth disputing and debating. I'm not sure where it will end up, but let me tee it up.

Are we sure that a "liberal state," by virtue of its electing Congressmen and Presidents who align with the Democrat Party, are also saying that they agree with the direction that Nancy Reid and Barack Clinton are taking the country?

Could it be that "liberal states" just want to be left alone to allow abortions, marry anything, and restrict guns in much the same way that "conservative states" want to be left alone to hunt, raise their families, and participate in faith-based organizations?

I think that, aside from the New Deal as a national solution with socialist (nee liberal) tendencies to get the country out of the Great Depression, today's "liberal" agenda stems from the lessons learned from Roe v. Wade.

In Roe, the question in its simplist form was whether it was an undue hardship for a woman who resided in Texas to have to travel to Louisiana to get an abortion. She wanted to have the abortion in Texas. SCOTUS ruled, in essence, that it WAS an undue hardship for someone in a "conservative" state to have to travel to a "liberal" state for a "liberal" activity, and that the "liberal" activity must be available everywhere.

The reverberations of that line of thought have brought us gay marriage, gun bans, and environmental regulations from liberal states to conservative states, as well as restrictions on faith-based organizations and school prayer from liberal states to conservative states. It is hard to think of cultural flows the other way -- what conservative values have been forced onto liberal states? Voting reform? Immigration enforcement? Right-to-work reform?

So, is it axiomatic that "liberal states" would attempt to disrupt an Article V Convention because they want to be a part of a larger national agenda of centralization of liberal principles from Washington DC? Or would they also want to go back to a time of localization of politics?

-PJ

[Publius]

Before moving to Georgia two years ago, I lived in the Seattle area. Washington is a liberal state because on the wet side of the Cascades, the two-thirds of the population living there is urban, suburban, secular, liberal and heavily Democratic. On the dry side of the Cascades, the one-third of the population living there is agricultural, conservative, religious, heavily Mormon and Republican. In statewide elections, the wet side always wins, which is why Washington votes heavily Democratic in statewide elections. Washington is two states unhappily married at the Cascades.

First off, the Mount Vernon meeting is not the Amendments Convention. It's just a preparatory meeting to discuss how the petitions to Congress for an Amendments Convention should be worded -- the wording must be identical -- and what rules should be followed at the Convention. (Congress may try to overrule that; see my long earlier post.) Liberal states will not send representatives to Mount Vernon because they like the present system where the Feds pay for most of everything. The last thing they want is to be financially responsible for everything that goes on in their states. It's about money, not control. These states will hope that the Mount Vernon preparatory meeting leads to nothing. In their black little hearts, they no doubt wish that Obama would call out federal law enforcement to break the meeting up.

However, at the actual Amendments Convention -- assuming that 34 or more states call for one and Congress sets the time and place -- the liberal states will be there to blunt conservative changes to the Constitution. If they can find a way to get around the rules and introduce their "dream" amendments, such as repealing the 2nd and 22nd Amendments, they'll give it a whirl. They won't win, but they'll try to jam sand into the machinery.