By the way, I hope this isn’t off topic, but I just received some great news about the Article V legislation currently moving through our legislature here in Arizona.
HCR2027 (a petition to Congress to call for a convention of states to propose amendments to the constitution) passed the house last week on a mostly party-line vote. There were a couple of cross-overs in the House Rules Committee, but in other committees and in the final floor vote, virtually all of the “Yes” votes were cast by Republicans.
Just as an aside, if this idea were so dangerous to traditionally conservative ideals, I wonder why the Democrats are so averse to it? But, I digress.
Having passed in the house, HCR2027 was then referred to the senate, where it suffered the near-death experience of arriving too late to be calendared. Our senators and representatives are part-time citizen-legislators who come to the capitol for four months, then return to their districts to do whatever. So, it looked as though its sponsors were going to have to wait until the next legislative session in 2015 to re-submit!
Today, the bill’s primary sponsor employed a parliamentary procedure known as a “striker-amendment,” whereby another member of the senate, typically a co-sponsor, who has another unrelated bill already on the agenda in a standing committee essentially agrees to sacrifice his bill and allows the late-comer to replace it.
What looked like rather dismal prospects for HCR2027 has now regained steam as SCR1016, and keeps Arizona in the running, at least for the moment, to be the first state to join Georgia in passing identical pieces of Article V legislation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but should this happen, I can’t overlook the historical significance of Georgia, one of the thirteen original colonies, and Arizona, one of the last states to enter the Union, joining together to apply to the Congress of the United States to call for a Convention of States to Propose Amendments to the Constitution.
If this does indeed happen, all that will be left to do is fill in the blanks!
As you pointed out, the party-line vote reveals which faction stands to lose power at an amendment convention . . . democrats.
The FL Senate Rules committee meets in a few hours, and I can guarantee the vote split will be nearly identical to AZ. My rat state senator, a tool of the Florida anti-education lobby, aka teachers’ union, won't even return my emails regarding Article V.