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*‘Mischief’?* *Editorial of The New York Sun | August 23, 2016* A “Pandora’s box of constitutional mischief” is the phrase the New York Times is using to describe a convention of the states to consider amendments to the United States Constitution. The Gray Lady is in full panic mode over such a convention, having awakened from its Rumpelstiltskinian slumber in respect of America’s supreme law. It’s discovered that we are now six states away from the 34 states needed to call for a states’ convention that would, in the Times’ phrase, be “unprecedented” in our Republic’s history. Which would be, in our view, precisely one of the convention’s virtues. It would mark the first time the states asserted their full constitutional authority. It would take two thirds of the states to convene such a meeting. The parlousness of our politics derives from the failure of anyone to step up to deal with the deep issues. This has brought us to what the editor of the New York Sun has called our “constitutional moment <http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704402404574528440210923978>.” The sooner we convene the states to address the deep issues, the sooner we’ll return to a calmer political life. The Times reckons that the seemingly inexorable progress toward a convention of the states arises from the fact that state legislatures have fallen increasingly under the control of the Republicans — and, in many cases, conservative Republicans. What it should be asking is: Why haven't the states been falling to liberal Democrats? According to Ballotpedia, in but seven states do the Democrats control the governorship, the senate, and the house. Such a trifecta is held by the GOP in 23 states. It doesn’t seem to occur to liberaldom that this could have something to do with substantive issues. The Times says an “amalgam of free-market, low-tax and small-government proponents, often funded by corporations and deeply conservative supporters like the billionaire Koch brothers and Donors Trust, whose contributors are mostly anonymous[,]” wants “an amendment to require a balanced federal budget.” It notes that this is a matter that the Congress has failed to endorse for decades. Proving whose point? The New York Sun, as it happens, opposes a balanced budget amendment. Yet we’d welcome a constitutional convention — particularly one that was not restricted to a few topics but, like the meeting of sages in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, was prepared to address a range of issues that have proved to be legislatively insoluble and that would be better solved peaceably than in resort to war. How about, say, the most basic issue we face, the monetary powers? If Congress won’t, maybe the states will end the era of fiat money. There is also the Bill of Rights. Liberals don’t like the Second Amendment. Here’s their chance. They don’t like the First Amendment, at least not since the Supreme Court allowed the charitable group known as Citizens United to promote in the middle of an election its film critical of a candidate named Hillary Clinton. What we suspect a Convention of the States would disclose is that diluting the Second and the First Amendments is unacceptable to nearly all of the states. It would be nice to make that clear once and for all. Not to mention the chance to shine a light on all those “penumbras” and “emanations” in which the Supreme Court discovered a supposed right to privacy so great as to forbid Connecticut and, by precedent, the other states from regulating the sale of birth control. The justices saw these penumbras and emanations in, among other articles, the Third Amendment prohibiting the quartering of troops in private homes in time of peace. >From such penumbras sprang *Roe v. Wade* and the other radical rulings that would have floored the Founders. There are no doubt radicals on the left (among the more distinguished of the breed is Sandy Levinson of the University of Texas Law School) who reckon that in a convention of the states, votes should be weighted by the population of the states, rather than one state-one vote, as in Philadelphia. Let’s hash that out, too. Whatever a convention of the states proposes, after all, three quarters of the states themselves would have to ratify before any of the proposals can be brought into the Constitution. Maybe we’d discover that it’s not the states that are so mischievous but that they are, rather, the adults in this great contest and, in any event, the contract partners in our federal system. ------------------------------ [image: Avast logo] <https://www.avast.com/antivirus> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com <https://www.avast.com/antivirus> __._,_.___ ------------------------------ Posted by: "Beowulf" <[email protected]> ------------------------------ Visit Your Group <https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/grendelreport/info;_ylc=X3oDMTJmaDY0bHJkBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE0BGdycElkAzIwMTk0ODA2BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNTMyMzY2NwRzZWMDdnRsBHNsawN2Z2hwBHN0aW1lAzE0NzIwNzg2NzI-> [image: Yahoo! 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