The "Liberty Amendments"

[TreasonousBastard]

Mentioned in the Bill Maher clip here:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210966391

I've seen this Koch plan talked about elsewhere, and it is indeed scary stuff. Even in the most divisive times times in the past (and there have been many divisive times over the years) we haven't come this close to a constitutional convention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liberty_Amendments

Impose Congressional term limits
Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment, returning the election of Senators to state legislatures
Impose term limits for Supreme Court Justices and restrict judicial review
Require a balanced budget and limit federal spending and taxation
Define a deadline to file taxes (one day before the next federal election)
Subject federal departments and bureaucratic regulations to periodic reauthorization and review
Create a more specific definition of the Commerce Clause
Limit eminent domain powers
Allow states to more easily amend the Constitution by bypassing Congress
Create a process where two-thirds of the states can nullify federal laws
Require photo ID to vote and limit early voting

Now, some of these things might not seem so bad, reasonable, even, but there are problems...

The first problem is that the convention may not limit itself to just these things, as bad as some of them are. Speech, religion (including abortion), Presidential power, and who knows what could easily pop up. Guns, of course. And who knows how they could go. And, of course, some of them are not reasonable at all.

The next problem is that we have had a Constitution for two centuries that has held up so far. We have expanded the size and nature of the nation, endured a Civil War and two major foreign wars, become a leading world power, and survived major internal crises with this Constitution and it has endured. We have so far accepted the slow evolution of it rather than major upheavals and it has worked. Two centuries of interpretation and understanding have brought it through varying political philosophies and we have agreed to accept these interpretations, even the ones we don't particularly care for.

They want a convention because they know that many of these ideas, and worse, have been tossed by the preferred way of amending. It is messy and clumsy, but sometimes that is the better way.

[Matthew28]

1. Let them die amendments

Give it all to the rich, fuck the poor and let them die is what this all comes down too.

Pure evil

[marble falls]

2. Fuck them guys.

[Midnight Writer]

3. For folks who claim to be Constitutional Originalists, they sure don't like the original.