For the past few years it has been
popular for folks of the right persuasion (Republicans and neoconservatives) to
call for a constitutional convention (“Con-Con”) in hopes of passing a balanced
budget amendment (BBA). A lot of people have jumped on that bandwagon; no doubt
your email inbox or Facebook news feeds have shown that.
While all of these efforts might be,
for the most part, well-meaning, they are extremely dangerous. Ignore the fact
that a BBA in itself is counterintuitive and counterproductive to its intent --
to balance a budget, the government needs only to increase revenues (taxes) to
meet expenses (spending). The real danger in a Con-Con is that it would open
Pandora’s Box.
Article V of the US Constitution
allows for a constitutional convention by which new amendments to our federal
government’s primary legal document can be proposed. 34 state legislatures
would have to submit applications for a Con-Con. Once said convention has
proposed an amendment, it would have to be ratified by three-fourths of the
states in order to become part of the Constitution.
Under such circumstances -- in
today’s world especially -- it would be a free-for-all and any amendment under
the sun could be proposed. That’s why you never hear anyone on the left denouncing
the right’s calls for a Con-Con (as they do for anything the right brings up –
and vice versa). They know that they, too, would have the ability to propose
amendments that meet their desires, whether it’s recognition of abortion as a
right, an increase in federal powers, or permanence of social welfare programs.
The Constitution is a document
better left alone. Adding to it is dangerous. Sure, some amendments introduced
after the Bill of Rights have some merit, like XV which clarified that no one
may have their rights abridged on the basis of race or color. But, others have
been downright ruinous to the United States, including XVI (which gave the feds
the ability to collect income taxes) and XVII (which transferred the election
of senators from the states to the people). The outcome of a Con-Con might make
XVI and XVII look docile by comparison; the legal basis of our federal
government could be forever transformed, even dismantled and replaced with
something new.
Were new amendments – whether they
were new controls or new powers – to be installed, who’s to say the law would
be followed? The Constitution in its past and current states clearly defines
the expectations and parameters of the federal government. We have allowed our
federal government to grow well beyond those lines, to the point that it has
almost become a national government, one that has assumed countless powers that
truly belong to the states and the people. It’s long been said that were the
federal government to actually operate within its constitutional limitations,
it would be one-tenth its current size.
It seems like every day we are
getting closer to a Con-Con becoming a reality. In recent years, most states
have seen bills and resolutions calling for a constitutional convention introduced
among their legislatures on an annual basis. The fact that so many legislators
and legislatures across the country have seriously considered them is
frightening. As our federal government continues to confound people on both
sides of the aisle and calls for a convention become common on social media, in
newspapers, and around water coolers, a Con-Con within the next twenty years is
certainly foreseeable, especially given its novelty.
If you value what our United States
were intended to be and what they should be (by their very definition in the
Constitution as she stands now) then you shouldn’t be among those calling for a
constitutional convention and you should be educating the people who are. A
Con-Con would be a con game, letting the wolves run the hen house.
From the 21 September 2015 Greater Niagara Newspapers
No comments:
Post a Comment