Today over the Internet was a discussion about the convention clause of Article V which begins at 9:45 minutes in: http://www.talkshoe.com/...
The guest is Rob Natelson, one of America’s best-known constitutional scholars. For 23 years, he served as Professor of Law at the University of Montana, where he taught Constitutional Law and became a recognized national expert on the framing and adoption of the United States Constitution. He pioneered the use of source material, such as important Founding-Era law books, overlooked by other writers, and he has been the first to uncover key facts about some of the most significant parts of the Constitution. Rob has written for some of the most prestigious academic publishers, including Cambridge University Press, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and Texas Law Review.
Progressives fear a convention, thinking the Tea Party would re-write the Constitution.
The reason the nation would never ratify a new constitution is because the one we have can’t be improved on: it was based on common sense: knowing governments go south and the need to hit the reset button--a provision to throw the bums out. Do you think your members of Congress are bums? I think mine are, and ideed all members of Congress are--a few justices of the Supreme Court to boot. All three of my reps are bums--Senators Boxer and Feinstein, and representative Capps: that’s what the convention clause of the Constitution is, throwing the bums out--which doesn’t mean the bums stop doing what they’re doing today, it just means the politic of a non-binding assembly of delegates proposing things we all know the bums never will, and over the several year period of ratification we shift humanity to a safer place. The USA shifting affects everything--we’re still the leader of the free world, remember. Do you really believe that not throwing the bums out now won’t have an inevitable consequence? Do you really believe corporate power and its hold on members of Congress won’t get us all killed?
I remember a black and white photo I saw as a kid, and though I didn’t know it then, it was of Parisians in the back corner of a café debating the rise of Nazi Germany. The men with their slicked-backed hair, the women in their dresses, espresso, beer and cigarettes, about fifteen of them, articulating: "We have a serious problem on our hands." They were talking about the truth, or finding out what it was in that moment, and that’s what I wanted to be, someone who talks about the truth. That’s what I thought a liberal progressive was, someone who talks about the truth with an idea/art edge, I always saw the liberals to the conservatives--we were the folks who were for the truth, but of the two siblings, we were the entertainer, the other, no matter how staid or lacking the creative drive, we all agreed on what the truth was or we better find out quick what it was or there’d be hell to pay....
Do you really think corporate power and ignoring the Constitution isn’t leading somewhere? Except this time it's not Parisians facing fascism, it’s the eternal principles of common sense of Jefferson, and then that Madison and the others at the Federal Convention of 1787 put together, knowing the very thing we the living face today would happen. They left us the convention clause of Article V. If as a Progressive you don't get it you’re like the Christian internet broadcaster in Maine I recently spoke with: a human being just like you who I assume is alike in that they want to be free so long as everyone else is too. If you want to be free, but not certain people, then you might as well consider yourself non-human or conditioned to be non-human. One way other the other, you as an entity, will have to examine that--not because I say so, but because science says so (no energy is ever lost or created)--everything's connected.
This misperception about the convention clause of Article V, and you parroting your arguments against it, you're like the guy in Maine: good god what would they come up with today? How and why people from both the left and right can be opposed to an idea the Framers placed in their masterwork should give anyone pause. All I know is, I want the truth, and at the Article V Convention the nation will find it.