Dear Rob, We can’t expect you to keep tabs on it all, so I wanted to take this opportunity to connect some dots that may have been left separated. As you may or may not know, last week a respected member of the OpEd community, Dr. Joel Hirshhorn, posted a piece which received a lot of attention. “So here we sit over 200 years after our nation was created, unwilling to use what is explicitly given to us in Article V of the Constitution – the option to have a convention outside the control of Congress, the President and the Supreme Court to make proposals for constitutional amendments. Do we really believe in the rule of law? If so, then we should understand that the supreme law of the land – what is in our Constitution – is the ultimate way to obtain the deep political and government reforms to restore true democracy and economic fairness to our society.”
Below Dr. Hirschhorn’ s piece were comments voicing the same fears of a convention that have persisted since the late 1940s and the birth of the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex. Namely that if we convoke a national convention the Constitution and its protections will be put at risk. That merely discussing something might somehow accidentally turn into new law. Nothing could be further from the truth because nothing can be ratified at the convention. You need the approval of 3/4 of the country to ratify an idea into an amendment.
With that safe-guard in place, now imagine what convoking a convention will do simply as a civic ceremony. It will stop politics as usual dead in its tracks, it will turn on the lights to what politicians and the MSM have made too dark to see. That’s why the convention clause is in the Constitution, to call time out when special interests prevent rational governance from taking place.
To those who balk that folks today are not as brilliant as the Framers of yesteryear, they forget that a convention is not an attempt to rewrite their brilliance, but to amend to it new ideas as solutions to problems of this new day and age. If you were a delegate Rob, what would you propose--what’s critical and non-partisan today? Electoral reform? Tax reform? Media Reform? A Balanced Budget? Term Limits? This is not rocket science we’re talking here, the 28th Amendment and what it shall be concerned with is pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain.
At the end of Dr. Hirschhorn’ s piece he mentions a new and growing movement calling for America’s first Article V Convention--FOAVC.ORG. All the information is there on that site. All the arguments put forth by Anti-Conventionists are bogus and that’s why the Framers wrote the clause the way they did: You are either Conventionist or Anti-Conventionist. Let’s have the Bush Administration and the Congress try that on for size.
Currently, on the OpEd News header there is advertisements for writer Mike Palacek (who I have contacted) and Eileen Flemming (who is already a member). I would like the FOAVC logo up there too. It’s now or never Rob. So, if you’re really in this fight to revive the Constitution, reform government, and restore the republic, please move on this. Please join us and help the movement make its way.
Sincerely, John De Herrera
