HuffPost: A Radical Right-Wing Dream To Rewrite The Constitution Is Close To Coming True
HuffPost: A Radical Right-Wing Dream To Rewrite The Constitution Is Close To Coming True
Six weeks before Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, more than 100 state lawmakers gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia, for a week of Founding Fathers cosplay. Their task, over three days in the town that bills itself as a living museum to America’s colonial period, was to approve a dramatic overhaul of the United States’ foundational text.
The lawmakers, nearly all Republicans, ratified six new Constitutional amendments: They imposed term limits on members of Congress, abolished the federal income tax and placed severe limits on the federal government’s ability to levy taxes, implement new regulations or spend money. While the rest of the country focused on the presidential election, the Virginia gathering partied like it was 1787. …
Primarily a conservative effort now, the prospect of a convention excites elements of both the right and left who see it as a useful way to improve a broken and dated founding document, check the powers of Congress, and work around the influence of special interest groups that have derailed popular policies, be they a limit on corporate campaign contributions or fiscal restraints on the feds.
Opponents, on the other hand, see a far more nefarious plot: a master class in astroturfing that could open the entire document up to a radical rewrite meant to serve the right-wing corporate interests that already dominate our politics, especially at the state level. The convention, they argue, could lead to the demolition of everything from the social safety net and environmental protections to civil rights laws. Or maybe even the Constitution itself.
“The First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment,” said Jay Riestenberg of Common Cause, a liberal group that campaigns against the calling of a convention. “Any civil rights, any constitutional protection in the Constitution could be up for grabs in this constitutional convention.” …
Common Cause and other groups have, over the last few years, focused their efforts on persuading states with longstanding convention resolutions to rescind them, with some success. Colorado’s state legislature in April voted to rescind all of the previous convention resolutions its general assembly had passed in an effort to ensure the state did not play an unwitting role in the calling of a new convention.
Colorado’s move could be a striking blow to the movement to call a convening of the states: Now, combining the Balanced Budget Amendment and plenary resolutions doesn’t add up to the necessary 34.
Still, that Walker and other conservatives may even be willing to try the legal route has aroused concern among convention opponents.
“They know their agenda is unpopular,” Riestenberg said. “So they have to find a different way to push their agenda without getting legislators or voters to care about it.” …
The left, for good reason, isn’t going to trust a convention that results from a Hail Mary legal challenge or a Republican Congress’ decision to call it, especially not when the majority of delegates would be appointed by GOP state legislatures that are steadily radicalizing against the basic tenets of democracy ― and “just a few months ago tried to throw out the results of a free and fair election,” Riestenberg said. And especially not if a conservative-heavy Supreme Court eventually blesses the whole process.
The right, meanwhile, has spent the last decade wading deeper and deeper into the fever swamps, bathing itself in conspiracy theories and the increasingly extremist notion that the country has been stolen from them. An entire political party is now premised on and beholden to false beliefs so rampant that they generated an armed insurrection in the United States Capitol. What happens inside that movement ― especially as Meckler and his allies continue to foment anger and court extremists ― when a convention that has been sold as a cure-all fails to produce what they want?
Riestenberg fears another potential outcome of that scenario: a compromise amendment ostensibly meant to walk the country back from the sort of crisis the convention could potentially create. To stave off disaster, the convention delegates might agree to bar corporate election funding but also force the government to balance its budget each year. Comity, at the price of crippling the federal government’s most basic functions.