Two days ago I posted a diary proposing a 28th amendment (the ‘Blackwater Amendment’) to the US Constitution, with the goal of prohibiting the use by government of private quasi-military or para-military organizations – defined roughly as corporate entities whose stock in trade includes the use of lethal force-- in foreign or domestic settings. Here is the text.
No person in the service, under the orders, or at the behest or bidding of the United States Government shall employ, pursuant to their duties as such, a firearm, or any other lethal or physical weapon of aggression, protection, or restraint, except that the said person be an employee of the United States Government, such as a member of the Armed Forces, an agent of the Justice Department, or in exceptional cases, a deputized federal marshal or equivalent, subject to the full battery of institutional laws, liabilities, and constraints customarily applying to such persons.
Since then, Kos has frontpaged a diary by Professor Larry. J. Sabato, advocating the position that a full blown constitutional convention should be convened, to re-examine and presumably to re-write the US Constitution. In this diary, I will attempt two things: first to argue in favor my own proposed amendment, and second, to argue strenuously that a constitutional convention is a terrible idea at this point in American history.
Background. My original diary was prompted chiefly by reports of the unprovoked killing of several Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, by members of the Blackwater Security Firm. The next day, Paul Krugman published an excellent commentary
on the Bushite love affair with mercenary forces, and the resulting mayhem to date, plus danger for the future. Also in my mind, although not mentioned in the diary, was the the use of Blackwater forces to police the city of New Orleans in its disastrous post-Katrina period.
These, and other reports, point to the danger to democracy of a private Praetorian Guard , and it seemed to me that one possible way to protect against such would be to write suitable prohibitions into the Constitution.
So much for background. Then why am I against a constitutional convention?
The simple answer is twofold: first, that the deep political divisions that now confront our nation pose huge risks to the enterprise of re-configuring our fundamentals, and second, that the degraded state of our political and (I am sorry that many may strongly disagree) cultural discourse, taken together, mean that we as nation are not at this point equal to the task. Explanations to follow.
Taking the second point first, one simple way to point up the deficiencies of our current political culture is to quote from an opinion piece in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer, of Sept. 1787, in the wake of our first constitutional convention. Correspondent Tench Coxe writing under the name “An American Ciitizen", compared the British and (proposed) American constitutions, and had this to say about the requirement that a candidate for president should be of a certain minimum age.
In America, the president is to be one of the people at the end of his short term, so will he and his fellow citizens remember that he was originally one of the people, and that he is created by their breath---. Further, he cannot be an idiot, probably not a knave or a tyrant, for those whom nature makes so discover it before the age of thirty five, until which period he cannot be elected
.
I would say this establishes a bench-mark difference between the revolutionary epoch of American history, and our own. The stricture was no doubt taken for granted in its time, and held good for almost two centuries – but a country which in the course of twenty years elected Ronald Reagan and then George W. Bush to our highest office has not, in my opinion, the simple brains to attempt a re-write of our founding document.
Then there is also the issue of political polarization. For example, while the majority of Americans approved of President Clinton throughout the dark days of his impeachment, the national bull-horn was in the hands of a rabid yet powerful minority, who were willing, without compunction, to make a bumswipe of said founding document, in order to gratify their political bile. My personal view of this, without attempting to psychoanalyze the likes of Tom Delay, is that the Republican Right saw in Bill Clinton a political figure who could de-rail the canonization (then in progress) of Saint Ronald Reagan and who must therefore be put to the political sword. The midterm elections of 1998 were viewed as great triumph for the Democrats – several Clinton tormentors were thrown from office – but in fact showed that the body politic was asleep at the wheel of vicarious governance, else the entire Republican congress had been thrown out, and impeachment proceedings halted.
All of which is to say, with so many of the pro-impeachment crowd still in positions of power and influence, not to mention the power and influence of right wing legal aviaries such as the Federalist Society, I am convinced that a constitutional convention at this time would be perilous in the extreme. Amend yes – but await better times to consider whether a revision is truly what is wanting.