Free Republic

It’s blatantly obvious Trump voters have been betrayed. I’m not blaming President Trump, I’m blaming Congress who just passed a boondoggle pork budget that goes counter to everything we voted for. It has the usual programs intact, plus several funding increases, the EPA, Planned Parenthood, Sanctuary Cities and not one cent towards The Wall. President Trump must be furious, as are we. Their excuse is "It's just part of the 2017 budget process, Trump will do 'his stuff' in the 2018 budget." I don't buy it. How many times have they kicked the can down the road before? It’s blatantly...

Subtitle: Recollections from Pre-Politically Correct America. A welcomed respite from the drudgery of learning multiplication tables in my third grade was Thursday lunch at the school cafeteria . . . sloppy joes! Forget today’s lean beef craze; this delicacy was wonderfully greasy and delicious. Notwithstanding Michelle O’s national lunch menus, I don’t recall a single fat kid in my homeroom class. The working-class neighborhood of my youth was multi-ethnic. In Leftist terms, it was diverse. My friends were mostly second and third generation Italian, Irish, and Polish. Of course, we called each other Dagos, Micks and Pollacks and somehow never...

Among the features of the ideal republic is the absence of factions and political parties. As per James Madison, a faction is a group of citizens, either a majority or minority, united and actuated by some common passion or interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or the aggregate interests of the community. A political party is typically a collection of factions. Imagine if every representative, senator, president, and bureaucrat took the Preamble of our Constitution to heart, and selflessly dedicated themselves to secure the Blessings of Liberty to themselves and their posterity. This is the public virtue hoped...

You can tell a lot about a man by his enemies, and I’d say the same thing is true about an organization. The Convention of States Project is using Article V of the Constitution to save the Constitution, because our Founders predicted the federal government might grow so large, corrupt, and unwieldy that it would never voluntarily restrain itself. They realized the citizens would need to reel it all back, so they gave us a tool in Article V to do just that.  Though we are just a grassroots organization, we are animated by the spirit of our founders –...

Full Title: As the anti-constitutionalists mount their opposition, be sure to stay informed with our Article V resources. The anti-constitutionalists are getting nervous. Radical activists on both the left and the right who support the status quo have realized that the Article V movement is taking off, and they're beginning to mount an opposition. Don't get caught flat-footed. Get informed. Be prepared to defend the Founder's solution to federal overreach with the resources located on the Responses to Opposition page on our website. Here you'll find clear, concise answers to all the most common objections to an Article V Convention...

Hillary Clinton ignited a firestorm a few months ago when she publicly called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Hillary’s saggy speech was on September 9th, and is worth watching again, both for her hubris, and for the reminder of what our nation and the world avoided. Recognizing a hanging curveball when they saw one, Team Trump jumped at the opportunity, and hit a grand slam, Deplorables Unite (Do you hear the people sing) one week later. ‘Welcome to all of you deplorables!’ Trump boomed as thousands screamed ‘Trump! Trump! Trump!’ and ‘We love you!’ Trumpsters embraced the...

A quick blurb. It is flashing red siren alert time for the Convention of States movement. Hopefully everyone who is signed up with COS received an email to contact six Nebraska senators who are filibustering LR6, the Convention of States Resolution. Should the single house legislature pass this resolution, Nebraska will be the eleventh state to apply for an Article V convention. For what it is worth, below is my email to these senators: Senator Lydia Brasch: lbrasch@leg.ne.gov Senator Matt Hansen: mhansen@leg.ne.gov Senator Tony Vargas: tvargas@leg.ne.gov Senator Bob Krist: bkrist@leg.ne.gov Senator Sue Crawford: scrawford@leg.ne.gov Senator Adam Morfeld: amorfeld@leg.ne.gov Dear Senator,...

The pizza gestapo are coming, according to a new report from the National Review. A little-known provision in the Affordable Care Act (aka “Obamacare”) is about to come into effect, and it could sink pizza franchises nationwide. The regulation would require restaurant chains with twenty or more locations to post nutritional information for every item on the menu and every variation of item on the menu. Domino’s executives figured out that there are over 34 million different combinations of toppings for their pizzas. That’s a big sign -- and an expensive one. Domino’s are owned and operated by individual businesspeople,...

Our once Free Republic continues to reel from a one hundred and four-year-old mistake: the 17th Amendment. Pardon me if I don’t celebrate tomorrow’s anniversary. Republican theory demands the consent of the governed. From ancient Greece, republican Rome, Saxon Germany, and the English kingdom from which we declared our Independence, the component members of their societies had a place at the lawmaking table. Greek ecclesia, Roman tribunes and senators, Saxon Micklegemots, English commons, lords and king, encompassed the totality of their societies. By this, the consent of the governed was present in every law. Unlike simpler Greek or Saxon societies...

Full Title: Constitutional Originalism or the "living Constitution": Gorsuch's nomination and a tale of two law profs Judge Neil Gorsuch's nomination has brought to the fore the seemingly dry argument about two competing theories of Constitutional interpretation, Originalism and the "living Constitution." Gorsuch himself is an "originalist" while the Democrat party arrayed against him puts its faith in a "living Constitution."Two recent essays both discuss Originalism and "the living Constitution": Prof. Glenn Reynolds' "Who the People?" in USA Today, and Prof. Mary Bilder's "The Constitution Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means" in the Boston Globe. Dry though the argument...

From a Renaissance fresco, “Take Rome as your example if you wish to rule a thousand years; follow the common good, and not selfish ends; and give just counsel like these men.” The Roman republic lasted several hundred years because it kept corruption of its institutions at bay. Its fall into empire and despotism began when the tribunate succumbed to corruption and no longer served to check the consuls. Once the senate was tamed through threats and promises of enrichment at public expense, there was no turning back. It happened quickly. Sulla marched on Rome in 82 BC and Julius...

BREAKING NEWS! Today North Dakota became the tenth state to successfully adopt our Article V legislation! This is a historic victory for the grassroots warriors of COS North Dakota, our legislative champions, and the American people. North Dakota joins nine other states calling for an Article V Convention of States for the purpose of proposing constitutional reforms that limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, impose fiscal restraints, and set term limits for federal officials, including Congress and the judiciary! Americans see a flailing federal government that is out of ideas. We are ready to break the shackles...

In earlier posts we learned the legal and political sovereign over colonial America was the King-in-Parliament. After independence, both sovereignties relocated to the new state legislatures. From Part IV, the Constitution put the Declaration’s recognition of legal sovereignty in the people into practice. Peaceful Revolution. Man is incapable of creating a perfect institution, suitable for all times. Through Article V, the decay and eventual death that typifies republics was no longer inevitable. The Constitution never pretended to perfection or to the exclusion of future improvements. On the contrary, the healing principle in Article V enables the legal sovereign to return...

With everything that’s going on in politics these days, it helps to remember the power that we have as individuals to make change. Examples of this are far too few, of course. But there is one that stands out. And you’ve probably never heard it. The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics. “I'll never...

After several years of trying, the Arizona State Legislature has just joined 8 other states in passing a Convention of States Resolution calling for a convention to propose amendments to the US Constitution. Today the AZ Senate joined the House in voting for this resolution. The called-for amendments proposals convention will be mujch more than an academic debate and an appeal as a supplicant to the US Congress. Article V (Part 2) of the US Constitution gives state legislatures the power to amend the US Constitution without the permission or approval of Congress, the President, or the Supreme Court. Yes,...

The Framing generation bequeathed a brilliant governing form to posterity. Perhaps its most notable feature is the separation of powers. Far less well-known, yet just as important, is what the Framers did with legal and political sovereignty. To review from previous posts: • The legal sovereign has unlimited, absolute, and supreme law-making power. The Constitution is the supreme law-making expression of the legal sovereign. • The political sovereign is the single person or body that writes statutes. As per Article I § 1, Congress is America’s political sovereign; it is responsible for crafting statutes necessary and proper to implement enumerated...

Our big spending national government—whether Republican, Democrat or whatever—ran up a national debt approaching ten trillion dollars during the 220 and some odd years prior to Obama taking office. During Obama’s 8 year term, our big spending government nearly doubled that debt. No one’s fault (cough, cough), but we and our posterity are now staring at an unbelievable, unmanageable, unsustainable, unpayable mountain of twenty trillion dollars in accumulated debt with no let up in sight! In fact they want to continue the wholesale printing and spending of money we don’t have and they’re planning on raising the debt ceiling to...

Subtitle: Sovereignty on the Move. Sovereignty is absolute. Notwithstanding the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, a person or body is the legal sovereign when he or it has unlimited law-making power, when there is no person or body superior to him or it. During America’s colonial period, a single body, the King-in-Parliament (or equivalently, Parliament) was the legal sovereign. As legal sovereign, and being unencumbered by a written constitution, nothing limits the earthly, supreme lawmaking power of Parliament. Parliament can amend its unwritten constitution as it sees fit, and no Parliament is bound by a previous Parliament. By the...

The Declaration of Independence did not answer the question of American sovereignty very well. Despite the recognized right of the people to alter or abolish their form of government, the question of sovereignty continued to be an important theoretical question of politics throughout the following decade. Some held that legal and political sovereignty devolved to Congress. Others believed it belonged to the mass of the people. Unlike today, the concept of special conventions of the people as legal sovereign hardly existed in the early 1770s. Instead, the various congresses, and conventions of representatives from the colonies, or any other gatherings...

From a study of the debates at the 1787 Federal Convention and contemporary discussion in the States, our Framers anticipated Article V would be employed far more often than has proved to be the case. A fundamental part of our Constitution is the provision for future changes. Since all earthly creations suffer from decay and corruption, our Constitution is likewise in need of maintenance and repair. Defects accumulate in our governing form. Unless corrected and reversed in the reserved setting of a convention of states, errors and contradictions will accelerate until a divided society erupts in revolution. We must accept...