Thursday, November 8, 2018

Calling A New Constitutional Convention Would Mean All Bets Are Off On What Results Having The Same Map

The billionaire oligarchs who have been hell-bent on reopening the Constitution by buying state legislatures to vote for that are, I think, overly optimistic that it would go their way, that they could get a majority of their bought state legislatures, often the cheaper to buy ones in those same tiny states that I mentioned yesterday, and they'd be able to destroy even the vestiges of democracy hard won through two centuries and more struggle against the original, anti-democratic slave-owner-Northern financier class written Constitution.

Well, to that I say if you rip up the old one or even open it up for rebuilding again, that old deal is entirely off. States could go their own ways if they didn't like the results of such a con-con of, by and for the cons. Those large population states who are so disadvantaged by the anti-democratic Senate,  New York, Massachusetts, other East Coast states - which would probably be able to take the small states in their regions along, certainly California and Oregon, maybe Washington State get to opt out of whatever atrocity the billionaire con-con would come up with.  And I'm betting what they came up with would be so much more unattractive than the too often abominable thing we've got now is that even lots of the bought states wouldn't want to be a part of it.

The original Constitutional Convention was a rigged thing to start with made worse by the blackmail of the slave power well represented by James Madison (who Charles Pierce worships rather counterfactually) and their allies in the corrupt Northern mercantile and financial interests who are, actually, well embodied in the real Alexander Hamilton (not the rap war and dance fiction figure of the Broadway musical).   It could have failed, it probably would have been a good thing if it had and they had been forced to try again.

But no matter what those groups did in 1787, 100% of whom were affluent white males, all nominally Christian (though more like baptized pagans), from a very narrow range of ethnic backgrounds,  THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR US TO BE BOUND TO MAKE THOSE SAME MISTAKES TODAY.   They weren't wiser, they weren't smarter   They most certainly didn't have better morals, certainly not when it comes to the most vital of those moral convictions necessary for the prevention of political and legal evil, the firm belief in an equal right to a decent life, including economic justice and an equal voice in making an informed choice for the people and laws that will govern usThey were almost to a white, rich male among them SLAVE OWNERS AND INDIAN MURDERERS.

A new constitutional convention should be a total non-starter if it doesn't start with  the possibility of states and regions opting out of what results.   It should not depend on the adoption by state legislatures - that would give far too much power to those who exercise it in a tyranny of the tiny states in the Senate now.  I wouldn't find it tolerable for several states even smaller than the small state I live in being able to vote my family into a billionaire-financed corporate fascism.  If New York and Massachusetts opted out of such a rigged deal, I'm sure the three Northern New England states and the other two would go it alone with them, I can imagine New Jersey might go with such a new nation and, coming up with our own Constitution, we would be in a position to make it more attractive than what states more remote from us would come up with.  I strongly think that many of the Eastern states would be in a position to negotiate on an Eastern States Constitution that could be made far more attractive.

Heck, if it came to that I'd imagine there might be a serious consideration of joining Canada floating around here.  Its more modern Constitution* has a lot of things in it that are quite attractive as compared to the 1787-slaver-written one we've got now.

A new constitutional convention would carry no legal obligation of the various states to go along with what even a majority of the ones adopting it would choose.  As soon as one is called, any legal obligations a state might be under under the previously agreed-to federalism of the present Constitution would be null and void.  There would be no question of keeping a union together that was dissolved to write a different constitution, it would have been dissolved by the action of calling the convention.   Even if no seriously awful changes were adopted, just opening it up would probably be a catastrophic temptation for state and regional nullification.

Any attempt to force a state to remain within such a new, unacceptable Constitution by military means would be an international crime in a way that opposing the unilateral choice of the 100%, mostly affluent or aspiring to be affluent, white males in state legislatures of Confederate states to break the Constitution on their own,  was not.  It would be opening the whole thing up in a totally different way for the first time. I have not the slightest doubt in the world that it would lead to bloodshed, most likely a bloodbath.  I think the people who chose that route, or got stupidly suckered into doing it, would have ample reason to regret having done it.

*Though that Notwithstanding Clause as so recently invoked by the American style fascist pig Doug Ford would be a problem.

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