A Constitutional Convention is more plausible than you might think, and potentially very dangerous

[jducoeur]

I call your attention to this fascinating recent article in The Economist. The tl;dr is:

• There's a little-known (and never-used) mechanism in the Constitution whereby state legislatures can demand a constitutional convention.
• A quiet but steady right-wing movement has been slowly steamrolling towards this for a number of years now, and are within striking distance.
• Their explicit goal is to require balanced budgets at the Constitutional level, likely destroying the social safety net.
• If a convention were to happen, there isn't much stopping it from going off-topic and changing the Constitution more broadly, with far lower requirements than the usual process for changes.

This is pretty scary stuff -- not quite "OMG the world's about to end", but an unsettlingly plausible pathway for the right to force through their agenda, relatively permanently, on a much broader basis. (Even if they just stuck to the balanced budget requirement, that is extremely foolish economically unless it is very well-hedged to deal appropriately with downturns.) And they've made good progress towards it, precisely because nobody's been paying much attention to it.

Not a short article, but worth a read...

Comments

[hudebnik]

I've been hearing about this, and wondering: under what procedures would a constitutional convention take place? How would delegates be chosen? How would individual proposals be made and approved/rejected? Assuming the convention produced a replacement Constitution, how would IT be approved/rejected? Answers to those questions aren't in the current Constitution, and they could make all the difference between "meh" and "pretty scary stuff".

Of course the whole idea of a constitutional convention is just another example of the "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it any more; let's blow something up and then think about what replaces it" sentiment that gave us Brexit and Trump. Regardless of what a constitutional convention produced, it would certainly disrupt things: everybody who knows anything about U.S. law would suddenly find their knowledge obsolete, and it would be amateur hour for the next several decades. Whoever happened to be at the levers of power during those decades (and it's likely to be the same paranoid right-wingers who have been planning a constitutional convention for years) would leave an indelible stamp on the character of the nation.

[dsrtao]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution

My observation: it's going to matter who is in power when the 37th legislature ratifies, and what each of them has said.

[dsrtao]

(and once settled, it probably will not be revisited... I hope. Because the alternative is to repeat it over and over again.)