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The Road to Hell…

… is paved with good intentions. FOR EXAMPLE…

…is paved with good intentions. The issue in this case — which was up in the air at the time of recording and now isn’t (we lost) — was a specific one: namely, should Republicans use a fifty-one percent majority vote in a state election to amend the state’s constitution so that it required a SIXTY percent vote to amend it in the future? The larger issue is, of course, should you use the unscrupulous tactics of your enemy in order to block them from using those unscrupulous tactics in the future?

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10 replies on “The Road to Hell…”

Colorado voters passed a measure (by 50% +1 standards) to increase the necessary votes to amend the CO Constitution to 55%. (2016 issue #71) Furthermore, petitions must include verified signatures (5% of votes for governor) in all 64 counties. And now CO is a blue-ER state than ever. Ohio is not a bellwether any more than CO is. The Dems who supported the CO changes only hate them in conservative legislatures and states.

I’m not sure what is going on. The last 2 R/A I’ve watched have frozen during the last 1/3 of the video and I’ve had to go to Rumble to finish the video! Is it me or the website? Any suggestions? This happened during both The Horror of Having Children and The Road to Hell.

You must always consider the fact that turnabout is fair play. What you do with good intentions can be done by your own enemies for their own reasons. If you can alter a State or Federal Constitution with relative ease and simplicity for “good” reasons, your foes can do the same for their own “good” reasons too.

What you do can be undone as easily as you did it.

A prime example of why this is a problem is the Patriot Act. Relatively good men created that law for relatively good reasons. They were legitimately attempting to protect the country from terrorists. But in order to achieve their goals they also seized power they should not have had. Never considering that bad men in the future might use those powers for nefarious purposes.

I knew this was a very bad idea at the time. I was proven correct because when Obama came to power his administration tried to use elements of the Patriot Act against their political opponents. They were largely successful and so were not deterred from even greater breaches of the public trust. So his side of the political spectrum went on to even greater infringements on personal liberty.

It’s a complex situation but that’s how we ended up with the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” political hoax and the virtual neutering of a President that existentially threatened the power base of the Left. If it were not for the Patriot Act and the abuses thereof the Trump presidency would have been even more successful than it was.

Never forget that there will be a future and there will be bad men in that future who will abuse whatever solutions you come up with today for today’s problems. Don’t take the seductively easy road because that will seduce the evil among us someday in the future. Then the solution becomes worse than the problem you implemented the solution to solve.

There is a very real danger of creating a death spiral that will destroy this nation if you don’t get it right.

My 3 thoughts on this:
1) I have come to the conclusion that at the federal level the constitutional amendment process is a little too difficult and that we ought to have an amendment that provides for a mandatory convention of the states every 50 (or 60) years to address amendment options and issues. For most people this would be a once in a lifetime situation. This convention still only proposes amendments and does not ratify them, which still takes 3/4 of states to put the amendment into the constitution. They could even meet and decide there are no amendments attractive enough to pursue further. But things sometime need to be addressed (say a balanced budget amendment?) that have festered for a long time without resolution. The exact process is still not clear to me for deciding what the agenda elements for this convention should be, but perhaps this point should be open to discussion and debate.

2) The constitution should really be “foundational law”, or as Scott calls it the Framework for law and governance. Normal legislation is then used in turn to create “positive law”. But too many state constitutions (including Florida’s) end up containing provisions that should really be legislated as positive law, but those provisions have previously failed in the legislature. So special interests gin up a mechanism to get their preferences on the ballot to be adopted as amendments. The situation in CA sound even worse.

3) My understanding is that executive orders are supposed to be guidance to the executive branch personnel on HOW to do the enforcement of existing law that they are charged with accomplishing, not WHAT should be enforced (or not enforced). Clearly a number of presidents and governors have a different perspective on that.

I often see well meaning Conservatives calling for a Constitutional Convention in one form or another. Many Conservatives suffer from a sort of linear thinking. We’re right, we know we’re right, we have historical proof we’re right, reason and logic are on our side, traditional morality is on our side, common sense is on our side, changes need to be made. How to accomplish those changes? Surely if all the above is true then all we need is the power to make the right changes and a Constitutional Convention is a means of doing that.

Which is not necessarily so. It kind of boggles my mind a little that me being a military man has learned a lesson that intelligent, solid, moral Conservatives seem to have missed …

The enemy always gets a vote.

We see a Constitutional Convention as a mechanism to right a lot of wrongs. If our side was all that needed to be considered, that would be true.

A Constitutional Convention is not a panacea. It’s a very risky proposition. Especially when the Left controls the media. Conservatives often ignore or discount the fact that a Constitutional Convention will be the raising of ALL voices, not just ours. With the probability that lies, propaganda, virtue signalling and the opportunity for power grabbing being the loudest voices. By a wide margin.

We see the Left very successfully employing these tactics now. It’s naive to think that magically somehow that success would not apply to the question of a Constitutional Convention. Which carries the likelihood of being as much or more of a disaster than not.

The Left, like most criminals, has a distinct mastery of seizing opportunity. They will rightly see a Constitutional Convention as an opportunity to do quick and dirty what they cannot do by more gradual means. They could be right in that assumption. Though they might not be correct, it’s a huge risk.

Even worse, you advocating for an automatic Constitutional Convention at a specified interval could easily spell total disaster. Oh it would probably work out OK if it fell during the peak positive influence and popularity of a POTUS like Donald Trump. But you can’t count on that.

What if it fell during a time like the second year of Obama’s first administration? When the Left was still vaunting him as the Nobel Laureate Savior of Mankind and like it or not, he was unreasonably popular. He wasn’t popular with US but he was very popular with NOT US.

Imagine if a mandatory Constitutional Convention had occurred then. The Left and their lapdog media would have pulled out all the stops. They would have lied. They would have cheated. They would have corrupted the voting process. We know they’d do all this because we know they have done so for lesser stakes.

They would have had considerable support for doing so out of “necessity”. They would have painted that Constitutional Convention as an attempt to “overthrow the will of the people” and as evidence of blind, hateful racism on our side. “How dare those horrible Fascists try to clip the wings of mankind’s Angelic Savior! They want to destroy your future and the future of your children! They’re only doing this because they can’t tolerate having a Black Man having the power to improve the whole world!”

It doesn’t matter in that situation if it’s all lies, they’re very good at lying., They would have done the things they do best. They’re very good at those things.

Even if such a Constitutional Convention were a success by our measure and we won that would give them decades of ammunition to use against us. They would point to us and say “There, those are the people who denied you the utopia you deserve and should be living right now! They’re the ones who destroyed the political paradise only we can give you. Those are the people who intentionally thwarted our noble efforts to strike the chains from your existence! They are nothing but execrable vermin! We must defeat them no matter what it takes!”

And that would be the excuse they would use to defeat us with lies and cheating out of “necessity”.

Have you learned nothing from recent history?

If you’re willing to roll the dice on the destruction of our Republic, a Constitutional Convention is a damned good way to go about doing that. We only have to lose once, they only have to win once. If we win then things are somewhat improved until the next mandated Constitutional Congress. If they win they will abolish the mandated Constitutional Congress the moment they seize power and they will seize power.

Even if it’s not mandated as you suggest, it’s not a good idea to let that genie out of the bottle. Don’t think that if we are successful the other side will fail to note the success and try to use the same mechanism to their own ends. We could very likely be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

I prefer things the way they are. If the Left thinks it’s ideas are so wonderful and so universally endorsed then the standard means of ratifying an amendment should be child’s play. All they have to do is convince 3/4ths of the people to back them. Look at the 18th Amendment and the 21st Amendment. A disastrous mistake was made in convincing the populace to support the goals of a relatively small group and it was corrected. All by the process of amendment ratification with no Constitutional Congress necessary.

That proves the amendment process is viable and reasonable of itself. If there was really as much support for the Left’s agenda then it should be reasonably possible for them to get support enough to accomplish it.

They know they can’t do that. That’s why they try to implement their changes through the courts, ephemeral executive orders, social coercion and media corruption. They would jump at the opportunity to accomplish everything they want by using the lapdog media to push through their goals all at once in a Constitutional Convention. The fact that they are forced to use subterfuge and the corruption of foundational law to achieve their goals is a foreshadowing of what they will do if they have the chance to get everything all at once.

… And they have a corrupt media on their side. Did I mention that?

It’s true, we might prevail anyway. The Left might not win. But then again they might, depending on circumstances. In fact they have as good or even better chance at getting what they want than we do because they have resources we do not and they’re willing to do things we are not.

So many laws have had unforeseen consequences, good and awful, beautiful serendipity or an unruly camel’s head in the tent. It makes we wish we could just put a moratorium on new laws and clean up the crap we’ve already generated. I’d start with tightening the Commerce Clause to what the founders meant and toss the crazy bills that bent its meaning and took away our freedoms.

And providing the nearly mandatory opportunity to clarify unclear or problematical constitutional language that experience has proven to be an issue (such as the Commerce Clause, 2nd Amendment, etc.) is largely why I suggested the mandatory convention of the states in my comment above.

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