The other day I grabbed a juicy apple out of the fruit basket, washed
it off and took a big bite. I spat out the fuzzy brown mush and
grabbed a glass of water to wash out the taste of spoil. That apple
sure had me fooled. Looking so good on the outside, and so very
rotten at the core.
The United States of America is coming apart at the seams. Like that
rosy red apple, the nation looks good on the outside. But the rot has
been growing year after year. Like the apple, if it were just one
little bruised spot, starting to fester, we could simply cut it out,
thus preserving the goodness of the apple. But when the rot begins at
the core and advances unknown, there is only one solution.
Attempts to rewrite the Constitution at this place in time is like
trying to cut out a soft spot on our apple while the rot is all
through the fruit.
Rewriting the Constitution is code talk for ending what we now know as
the United States of America. It would signal the emergence of the
Corporate Confederacy. At first it would appear to be a solid front
in support of corporate supremacy. But as time moves on it would fall
into a warring mess of corporate states doing what corporations do
best, take over the weaker corporate states and move on one another
for total world control. And if anyone wonders how we, the people
would fare? Just look at Puerto Rico. And if that doesn't chill your
bones, take a trip to Haiti.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/17/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Truthdig
We Are One GOP-Controlled Statehouse Away From a Convention to Rewrite the
Constitution
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/we_are_one_gop-controlled_state_
legislature_away_from_a_20161116/
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Posted on Nov 16, 2016
The rotunda at the Texas State Capitol. (Phil Roeder
(https://www.flickr.com/photos/tabor-roeder/) / CC-BY-2.0
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) )
Republicans are one state legislature away from acquiring the legal
authority to call a new constitutional convention
(http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a50672/state-legislature
s-republicans/) under Article V of the Constitution, reports Charles
Pierce
at Esquire.
The GOP currently controls 33 state legislatures. It needs 34 to call a
convention.
An Article V convention has been a lollipop on the political right for some
time now. To constitutional experts, a new convention is like talking about
the neutron bomb. Advocates of the Article V movement insist that they can
limit a convention to certain topics. (Most of these topics are pretty
awful
on their own as they seem to be directed at re-establishment of the
Articles
of Confederation, if not the Confederate States of America.) The problem
with that is that there [is] absolutely no precedent in law or in history
to
back up that contention.
The last constitutional convention we had was supposed to improve the
Articles. It ended up throwing out the entire government and starting from
scratch. That's why serious constitutional scholars are scared to death of
one. Well, that, and the fact that we'd be trading in James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and George Mason for .
In a 2014 article for The Washington Post, Robert Greenstein, founder and
president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, called a
constitutional convention
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/21/a-constitutiona
l-convention-could-be-the-single-most-dangerous-way-to-fix-american-governme
nt/?utm_term=.68c848225d8c) "the single most dangerous way to 'fix'
American government."
The implications are enormous. At stake, potentially, are the freedoms we
take for granted under the Bill of Rights; the powers of the president,
Congress and the courts; and the policies the government can or cannot
pursue. Conventioneers could alter absolutely anything about the way the
United States is governed. Some say they want to terminate all federal
taxes
and to require super-majorities in the House and the Senate to put any new
taxes in their place. Others want to bar the government from carrying out a
number of its functions, for example by constraining its ability to
regulate
interstate commerce. Whatever changes a convention approved would be
enshrined in the Constitution if three-fourths of the states ratified them.
Yet the processes for impaneling the convention, selecting the delegates,
setting the convention's voting rules, and determining what issues the
convention would consider and how much of the Constitution it would seek to
rewrite are a mystery. That means that under a convention, anything goes.
There are no rules, guideposts or procedures in any of these areas. ...
there has not been a constitutional convention since the first one, and for
good reason. As constitutional experts from the late Chief Justice Warren
Burger to Justice Antonin Scalia to Harvard Law School Professor Laurence
Tribe have warned, a constitutional convention would place the nation in
uncharted territory, with very serious risks for our political system.
Convening a convention, as Tribe put it, would be "putting the whole
Constitution up for grabs." And although I don't often agree with Scalia,
he
hit the nail on the head when he said recently: "I certainly would not
want
a constitutional convention. Whoa! Who knows what would come out of it?"
...
Constitutional law experts generally agree that it would be up to Congress
to decide [the] issues. The president has no role, and with no legal
guideposts, the courts probably would decline to intervene. Given the high
stakes involved, these issues could generate intense partisan division and
acrimony, and Congress could make decisions on them on a highly partisan
basis.
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly (http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly)
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