Heck, a runaway Con-Con is practically the entire backstory of the third book in the EFAD trilogy
.Anyway, there's a video in there and in the middle of it is about fifteen minutes of Laurence Tribe plainly and engagingly describing exactly why a Constitutional Convention would be a bad thing at this precise point in history, and for once in my life, I found myself agreeing with practically every word he said. (Well, it was the second time, actually. The first was when he warned his fellow progressive pinko lefties that the "collective interpretation" of the Second Amendment was a farce and endangered all those other amendments they love so much.)
Any political issue that makes bedfellows out of Tribe and the Birchers is one worth a moment's pause.
*With purchase of a North Carolina of equal or greater value.
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13 comments:
Amen.
I like what you did with the asterisk there... And yeah a con-con right now is a Very Bad Idea...
Do you have a link to the first time you agreed with him? It might make certain arguments easier, or at least more entertaining.
Erin,
Here's a Tribe quote, and for added double bonus points it's cited in a New Republic article: "[T]he amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification."
Since I want a constitutional right to bodily autonomy, I am down for the idea.
Not (just) just for my love of delicious drugs, but also for my love of Shadowrun. I want fucking cyberwear, goddamnit.
Besides the Fact that if a Con-Con were to happen, AND anything useful would be able to be accomplished (other than one side screaming "I have a Right to have Free Steak!" and the other saying " I have a Right to Free Ammo if he gets Steak!"), it would take 3/4 of the States to Ratify it. 37/38 Minimum, and does anyone think that the 12-15 VolksRepublik's Political Hacks would allow such a Vote to happen? I mean, talking about putting one's head in one's noose.....
A ConCon today would be a farce of delegates cutting deals to get what they want. The resulting Constitution would be hundreds of pages long, and would include everything from free marijuana and jobs for everyone to school prayer.
You could structure the Con-Con thusly:
Members to be appointed by the Governor of each state.
No individual may be appointed as a delegate if he is less than 35 years of age; or works for any level of government; or receives any type of assistance from any level of government; or works for an entity/corporation/non-profit/foundation that has received any government monies within the previous 10 years.
That should really narrow it down to about, oh, five or six people per State. Manageable, methinks.
Divemedic - A ConCon today would be a farce of delegates cutting deals to get what they want. The resulting Constitution would be hundreds of pages long, and would include everything from free marijuana and jobs for everyone to school prayer.
Completely agree. The name of the game these days (and, perhaps, it always has been except during the Magic Summer of 1787) is "GET ALL I CAN!", not "form a more perfect union".
The problem is that rights are generally what are now called "negative rights", and that term has such -- negativity-- attached to it. Positive rights are so much more positive and cheerful. Who wants negative rights when the right to say "gimme" is on hand?
Negative rights are only important when one wants to say "No! Stop! Don't! Leave me alone!" and you want others to help enforce that want.
About the only good thing that could come out of a con-com would that it would be a legal justification for the blue states to leave the USA, by adopting this new document when the red states refuse to do so.
After thinking about the blood letting of the American Civil War, I would be in favor of letting them go, provided they allowed conservatives in those states to leave.
We could reinstate the Homestead Act, and encourage them to claim 20 acres of Forest Service or BLM land in the US.
Or even better, pull a West Virginia, and apply for admission into the USA.
There would be no good reason to allow them to drag upstate NY, downstate IL, northern CA, southern OR, and eastern OR and WA into hell with them.
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