Free Republic

Relax, Jonathan. This was liberal paranoia on steroids. On his Sunday Show on MSNBC this week, saying that the prospect of a constitutional convention, something advocated by many conservatives and Republicans, "scared the hell out of me," and really "blew my mind," Jonathan Capehart actually expressed this concern: "The one thing that folks need to understand is any rights that have been granted under the Constitution, even as an amendment, such as granting full U.S. citizenship to the former slaves, would be up for grabs in a constitutional convention! "And with the way folks [i.e., conservatives] are acting right now,...

Mark Levin, who hosts one of America's top radio talk shows and is considered by supporters to be the people's pundit on the Constitution, is rallying his 8.5 million-strong audience to demand an historic convention of state governments to halt the "oppressive power" of the federal government. The author of two New York Times bestsellers on the threats to the Constitution, Levin hopes his latest, "The Liberty Amendments," out mid-August, will spark the state lawmakers to tap a rarely used Constitutional provision to institute measures that would brake President Obama's use of executive orders, bar thousand-page laws and collar inventive...

The Case for a Federalism Amendment How the Tea Partiers can make Washington pay attention. By RANDY E. BARNETT In response to an unprecedented expansion of federal power, citizens have held hundreds of "tea party" rallies around the country, and various states are considering "sovereignty resolutions" invoking the Constitution's Ninth and Tenth Amendments. For example, Michigan's proposal urges "the federal government to halt its practice of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution of the United States." Article V provides that, "on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states," Congress...