Whittling away at the Constitution

[jducoeur]

Check out this article from snarkyman. Every time I think I'm just getting paranoid, the government takes another step in the wrong direction...

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

José Serrano (NY), the congressman proposing the resolution, looks like he first proposed this in 1997 (as H.J.RES.19 of the 105th Congress). He was later joined by Christopher Shays (CT) as co-sponsor, and similar resolutions were proposed by McNulty (NY) as H.J.RES.39 and Hoyer (MD), with Berman (CA), Frank (MA), Hyde (IL), Pallone (NJ), Sabo (MN), Sensenbrenner (WI) and Skaggs (CO) as H.J.RES.88.

In each case, the resolution was referred to the Judiciary Committee, who referred it to their subcommitted on the Constitution, where it subsequently died quietly.

In the 106th Congress, he was also the first one off the block (H.J.RES.17) with Shays; Frank followed with H.J.RES.24 and everyone else (including Shays, but not Skaggs this year) on H.J.RES.38. Once again, all three resolutions died in committee.

In the 107th Congress (H.J.RES.4), he didn't get a co-sponsor, nor did the other two resolutions materialize according to Thomas.gov.

This time, which also hasn't seen a co-sponsor or echoes (yet), it hasn't officially been consigned to the subcommittee on the Constitution. Yet. In the past that usually happened by February. But there haven't been any peeps on it from the Judiciary Committee, either.

I had to dig for any comment on it on Serrano's web site; the best I could find was a one or two sentence comment in a "my legislation this month" press release. For the most part, it's conspicuously absent from his press releases and position papers; I suspect he mentioned it the time I found only because he had other, more interesting legislation that month that he wanted to announce.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

This thing's been knocking around for quite some time. It seems more a matter of some legislators thinkig that term limits are a bad idea in general than it is something for conspiracy theory and paranoia.

Plus, the process for passing an Amendment is a huge deal. Three-fourths of the states is most definitely non-trivial. The Congress can plot and plan all it wants, but the people are more in control of this one.