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

[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.)