Let me take this occasion to express some general observations about the current state of play.
Clearly, the road will be long and tortuous with many an IED hidden along the way. Support from the conservative side is obviously not unanimous. Some conservatives are motivated by concerns which deserve to be considered and seriously addressed but some who object from the right entertain motives which are selfish in the extreme. I would put the opposition by the NRA in the latter category because that organization would see the whole Constitution and the whole Republic lost because it has an unfounded fear of a threat to the Second Amendment.
him him and Such a fear is unfounded because of the arithmetic which says that of 99 state legislative bodies only 13 Houses from different states would be required to stop an attack on the Second Amendment, or to stop any liberal proposition. Republicans control the vast majority of these state legislative bodies. Therefore, those who fear a runaway convention are voicing fears which are entirely unfounded. In the case of the NRA, they are exploiting those unfounded fears. Additionally, there are those who crave a showdown, they want a civil war now. They disguise their motive with other objections which they repeat it every new thread by simply ignoring the responses such as the arithmetic cited above. The pattern is repeated over and over again.
So the downside is contained but what about the upside? This raises the often heard objection that dissembling politicians in Washington who have made an art form of evading our existing Constitution will continue to evade an amended Constitution, so why try? Process or structural amendments are difficult to evade and the object should be to get that sort of reform enacted. Besides, to remain inert is the counsel of despair.
It is my subjective, visceral estimation that no serious reforms will be enacted absent some sort Of "Black Swan" event which so energizes the electorate that they are actually willing to consider real reforms. I cannot foresee what such an event might be, that is the definitional meaning of "Black Swan" after all. However, some obvious history changing events might include a financial crisis, a war, a series of terrorist attacks, a major political upheaval such as corruption at such a level that leads to the impeachment of a president, a serious plague, cyber attacks which seriously threaten the population, or simply falling off the cliff of our own debt.
It is important to understand that the left will not be passive, rather they will be determined not to let a good crisis go to waste and we can expect them to use any dislocation to advance tyranny. I have no doubt that the left will have more contingency warmaking plans than does the Pentagon to roll out in the event of a national crisis. Will we conservatives be prepared? If history is a predictor, we will not be prepared because it is in the nature of conservatives to attend to their families and their livelihoods and not to seek secular salvation in politics. We are more likely to repeat our posture of passive reaction than to show a new proactive side. That is one of the major problems in securing any reform from the right and Article V is not excluded from this historical reality just because we would like it to be so.
Reforms have not been enacted to date because it is in the interest of the political class to fail to act those reform. They have constituents who vote and constituents who fund them and recent events have demonstrated beyond doubt that, at least on the Republican side, the interest of those two constituent classes clash. The structure favors constituents who fund politicians over constituents who merely vote or who refrain from voting. So long as our economy muddles along and so long as the treasury has enough borrowing power to hand out bread and circuses to the 47%, the electorate is unlikely to bestir itself, to educate itself, or to insist on real reforms. If campaign money wins elections over the interests of an uninformed electorate, politicians will govern in the interests of their constituents who fund them and campaign by pandering. The media will not cooperate at all. Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics, all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial, must be taken into account and we can expect that every serious reform will be labeled racist. This is not new but these problems are increasingly acute.
I do not advocate Article V reforms because I think getting reforms done will be easy, to the contrary I think it will be extremely difficult. Our duty as conservatives, as patriots, is to soldier on.
