I'm not inclined to risk letting today's right wingers rewrite our Constitution.

Even if it makes people’s lives “better”

Would you accept a constitutional convention that did not let progressives participate?

I fear that is the direction that Trump is dividing this nation.

They've been working on this for decades, are extremely powerful and well organized, and know in great detail they want in it.

However perilously close they came in 2016 to mounting a legal putsch, they lost ground again in 2018, and in November we're going to make this once again only a theoretical question.

representatives of the states would be appointed to attend, most would be republican.

The Constitution is fine. We need to do a better job electing people who will actually uphold it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Kentuck, you cannot be serious here.

I don't recall the number of states that would go along with this, but I remember it worried me.

We will lose the 1st Amendment.

Get an Amendment that bans abortion. One that makes gun rights absolute without restrictions. A balanced budget amendment that will destroy Social Security. No new Rights will be gained.

It's not a matter of who would be invited. See the Constitution to understand why that is so.

Result in someone drafting a new constitution. I personally think the current one is daft. But most people want to wait and see what fate brings. So they are OK with trump or trump like people writing the next one. Why participate if you can just wait around saying no this one is perfect...

Last edited Sat Sep 12, 2020, 10:22 AM - Edit history (1)

This is one of the items the Koch brothers, like-minded ideologues, and their corporate lobbyist allies have been quietly pushing for years. They would like nothing better than to rewrite the constitution to lock in their view of the way things ought to be and make reform impossible.

It would be a second Confederate Constitution, which did the same thing.

Don't think for a minute they don't have draft proposals that were written up years ago -- part contingency plan, part political wish list -- that can be dusted off and updated pretty damn quick.

Through money and connections they have the influence to be a huge or even dominant influence on a 2nd CC. No other group has anything like this kind of off-the-shelf game plan.

So what do we have to lose? Everything.

Koch has been financially backing many think tanks and other groups pushing for this.

In addition actively gaming out how to hijack the process and dominate a convention. The end results would not favor the workers, but corporate power.

Too little to gain, too much to lose.

The founders built strong walls around the Constitution to keep it from changing every time the wind blew from another direction.

to back their ideas.

Time to educate or re-educate our citizens on how all this works.

I’ve already read too much about how Republicans, having garnered something like 34 states to have a second convention, have no other motive than to draw up the constitution on their ideals, not representing “we the people”, but “we the party”, “we the money”, “we, the privileged.”

I’ve not read much of anything about it from Democrats to this point. The surface issues are sure to attract a great amount of interest, but I’ve read plenty on DU about the hidden agendas that Republicans wish to be included - right out of the Koch playbook and the Federalist Society.

I wouldn’t trust the process to be fair. We all know how things work. The title of the bill, article, attachment etc, says one thing, but what’s buried within is quite another, and that, my friend, is what Republicans will be after.

Any amendments need to come from Congress.

The states would screw everything up.

I will advocate the addition of language similar to Article 50 of the EU Lisbon Treaty.

There are others who would want it as well, especially as a check to right wing extremism ideology getting entered into the document.

I agree with the point that our citizenry needs to be better educated about the nature of the Constitution and how it works, and that we also need to elect representatives who will bother to uphold it. More people - in fact, every US citizen - should know who Barbara Jordan is, and the strength and principle she showed for the Constitution during a national crisis should be held up as the gold standard.

Her remarks begin at the 4:00 mark:

the RW'rs are short on, who try so hard to tailor it's meanings to their own selfish ideological whims.

The people who would benefit from such a thing would not be us, it would be the billionaires and the Christian right.

Is it really that impossible?

And we're not quite there yet. You would have to get all 50 states to agree on this, plus US territories like Guam and Puerto Rico, and there's no way that is happening in our current political climate.

months, if not years, and we would end up with a document 1,000 pages long!

But I don’t see it happening, nor do I think that it would be a good idea.

-Laelth

A loose confederation of states.

The only reason we would need a Constitutional Convention, in my mind, would be if we lost our other Constitution. It is presently being threatened, foreign and domestically, in my opinion.