Free Republic

Elections no longer serve their intended purpose, to temporarily empower others to make law on our behalf, subject to constitutional limitations. Obama plainly said last week that the outcome of the midterms meant the exact opposite of its results. He will issue diktats on behalf of those who didn’t vote! His first act was to lead a barbarian invasion across our southern border. A last ditch defense of our republic demands two actions. First, the virus that afflicts our governing body, Barack Obama, must be excised. If not, he will continue his scorched earth demonic march through our God given...

As our once republic swirls down the drain of despotism, a common call at FR to restore freedom is to “just enforce the constitution we have.” In a perfect world of cuddly puppies and chocolate rivers, we could live in unspoiled freedom and happiness if we only enforced the written constitution. The problem is that no nation ever was, nor will ever be, composed of saints. If men were saints, government wouldn’t be necessary. If that sounds familiar, it should. After years of study on the nature of government in general, and republics in particular, James Madison and other framers...

All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress – unless the President says otherwise. “This is how democracy works,” Barack Obama lectured the country before giving everyone the specifics of his expansive one-man executive overreach on immigration. If you enjoy straw men but are turned off by open debate and constitutional order, this speech was for you. Obama acknowledges his overreach openly every time he argues that he intends to do the job of an obstinate Republican congress. In his speech, Obama scolded those who question whether he has the authority to change the legal status of...

Andrew Biggs. He is the Senate Majority leader here in Arizona. He was just unanimously voted back into his seat. He is also the fellow who REFUSES to let Article V go up for debate. I've written to him. His secretary gave me this link to a panel discussion on Article V. In this video, near the end , a Pro Article V advocate asks all those assembled: How many here support Andrew Biggs refusing to bring Article V debate to the floor? Nobody raised their hands. I mentioned that in a follow up letter comparing MR BIG to...

Full title: Lawful and Peaceful Revolution: Congress’ Present Duty to Call a Convention for Proposing Amendments. Now more than ever, it is time for the people via their states to stop the runaway train of tyranny. Despite a landslide midterm win, the GOP is emotionally and institutionally incapable of defending congressional prerogatives against a lawless president. It is past time to reassert our right, both constitutionally and God given, to free government. This fourth in a series of excerpts from the Hamline Law review is designed to arm freepers with the intellectual ammo to convince their state reps and senators...

Full title: Lawful and Peaceful Revolution: Congress’ Present Duty to Call a Convention for Proposing Amendments. Article V figured prominently in the public debate on the constitution, which began immediately after adjournment of the federal convention on September 17th 1787. 30. James Madison praised the proper balance between ease and difficulty in amending the constitution. From Federalist 43 of January 23rd 1788, “(Article V) guards equally against that extreme facility, which would render the constitution too mutable, and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults.” IOW, setting the bar at two thirds to call amendment conventions was not...

Full title: Lawful and Peaceful Revolution: Congress’ Present Duty to Call a Convention for Proposing Amendments. The means to peacefully amend our form of government is unique to American constitutions, as evidenced in the early state constitutions immediately after independence and the 1777 Articles of Confederation. In an odd twist, it was the amending Article, number XIII of the confederation that sowed the seed of its own destruction. While acknowledging that government must be amenable to change determined by its member states, it required unanimous consent of all states. In theory the Articles of Union were amendable, in practice they...

Full title: Lawful and Peaceful Revolution: Congress’ Present Duty to Call a Convention for Proposing Amendments. The solution to America’s problems is to be found within the American tradition. Fabian socialism, fascism, islam are foreign imports. As varieties of Utopian statism, they not only offer no reasonable solutions, they are hostile to our cultural DNA. They ignore four hundred years of customs, beliefs, and replace them with oppressive forms unfit for free society and contradictory to free government. This 1990 treatise examines the history of Article V from its conceptual beginning in the Articles of Confederation through the 1787 Federal...

With sixty-six of ninety-nine state houses in GOP hands, the prospect for a successful state convention to propose amendments has never been, and likely never will be, better. After all the back and forth at FR, one aspect of Article V hasn't been discussed very much. Although major elements of the national, central government predictably thinks otherwise, the language of Article V doesn't require the states to make identical applications to Congress. There is nothing to remotely infer the states must make identical applications. From Federalist 85, just two thirds of them need to apply and Congress must call a...

So, I've been working on a little booklet to present/illustrate the reasons why the amendments are needed in addition to the amendment-text itself — I'm not entirely pleased with the justifications I've written up, and I'm not sure that these are enough for presenting to an Article V Amendment-convention, but nonetheless here they are. [Link to Booklet]

This speech was presented to Campaign For Liberty – Memphis on March 24, 2014. It exposes some of the false claims made by those pushing for the so-called “convention of states”. 1 https://vimeo.com/107933176 Below are hyperlinks to the exhibits referred to in the speech. Additional resources are also included. The one page Chart which illustrates our Declaration, Constitution, and federal system is HERE. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report 2 cited in the speech was dated March 7, 2014. CRS’s revised Report, dated April 11, 2014, is HERE. The Report exposes as false the assurances that the States would be...

I keep getting asked about this and people keep advocating it, so let's talk about it. The issue is a Constitutional Convention, with the expressed intent being to return the United States to its Constitutional Roots. Sounds like a good idea, yes? Well, it quite arguably is, if you'd like to see the government return to its Constitutional boundaries. The problem is that this "remedy" isn't a remedy and if it comes to pass what you want won't happen. I know this for a fact and, if you think about it, so do you. I know what you're going to...

A common refrain from Article V state amendment convention opponents is that all we need to do is follow the constitution we have. For the constitution to be implemented as it should ideally be, i.e. as our supreme law, we must send honorable, virtuous men and women to Washington DC to fulfill its purpose and tenets. Unfortunately, this belief falls into the same dangerous solution as offered by Socialists, who tell us socialism will finally work once the “right men and women” assume the reins of power. The reality is that the people we send to DC are like the...

It may sound pedestrian to point out, but it’s critical to restate why it’s so important that our nation is called the United States of America, and not simply America. The full name emphasizes that the Founders viewed the nation not as one monolithic entity but as a union of sovereign entities delegating limited powers to a central government. To preserve this balance, the Founders put a number of checks in the U.S. Constitution, most notably creating the Senate, which allows for equal membership from every state, thus preventing states with larger populations from running roughshod over the interests of...

To Free Republic opponents of Article V, I put this question, “what infringement of our natural and constitutional rights, or other high crime against our republic, could compel you to support an Article V state amendment convention to propose amendments to our constitution?”

As the November 2014 elections draw closer, Republicans are fixated on taking control of the Senate and Democrats find themselves focused on picking out china patterns for a presumptive Hillary Clinton inaugural ball in 2017, conservatives should consider the fact that a Constitutional Convention is very much within reach in 2015. Once the votes are counted, the Republican Party may just control the needed number of statehouses across the country to invoke the rarely discussed provision set in Article V the US Constitution which requires Congress to call a convention of states to propose amendments. Better still for conservatives, the...

Sparked by fears that “many dedicated incumbents could be run out of office by well-financed campaigns by dangerously anti-government factions,” Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) and 42 Democratic co-sponsors have drafted a Constitutional Amendment that aims to curb free speech. “Right now as long as a person has enough money to afford it he can take out an ad, publish a broadside, or fund a TV spot against a sitting member of the Government,” Udall pointed out. “The men and women who have devoted their lives to serving the citizens of this great republic don’t deserve this kind of treatment.” Under...

Constitutional convention advocate Mark Meckler praised the participation of Democrats and others in the movement. The New American 28 June 2014 How would conservatives — good-hearted, well-meaning, Constitution-loving conservatives who have been persuaded to join the Article V Constitutional Convention camp — react if they knew that some of the leaders of that very movement were not only accepting the participation of liberals in the planning, but praising their contribution? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, as soon as Mark Meckler’s latest article begins being bounced around the Twittersphere and Facebook. ... Full Story:http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/18591-article-v-promoter-praises-democratic-leadership-in-movement

An Article V convention, also known as the Convention of States, has quietly become a political inevitability, as state legislators all over the nation consider how to rein in the federal government’s unprecedented overreach and abuse. Last week, a group of over a hundred state legislators – most appointed as delegates from their states – came from all over the nation to Indiana to prepare for the Convention of States. The legislators, who hailed from thirty-three states, attempted to establish the structure and rules of a convention. Though Article V is clear about Congress’s duty to call a convention upon...

INDIANAPOLIS | The Assembly of State Legislatures concluded its work at the Indiana Statehouse on Friday, having tasted the difficulty of getting different states to agree on even minor matters, but still optimistic about the prospects for a future Convention of the States. The 94 delegates from 29 states spent the morning polishing a resolution officially changing the group's name from the Mount Vernon Assembly and urging other states, especially states with Democratic legislatures, to join the mostly Republican members of The Assembly of State Legislatures at its planned December session. Questions over whether delegates to the December meeting should...