22nd Aug 2022

2025: Trump Plans to Re-Write the U.S. Constitution

After the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush and the earmark-happy excesses of congressional Republicans in the Bush years, the Tea Party rebaptized the GOP in the faith of limited government and constitutional constraints. It was a time of first principles.

Trump's conservatives claim to support the U.S. Constitution but the only amendment they can quote to you is the second. Occasionally I'll find someone who also knows the first amendment but, that's it.  

How can you possibly claim to support the rights put down in the original ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution when you don't even know what they say?

The prospect of shaking up our political system has excited Trump’s supporters. But many of those same supporters—including Tea Partyers and traditional Republicans, whose party descended from the drafters of the 14th Amendment—purport to value the Constitution. They should wake up to the fact that Trump undermines the Constitution they claim to cherish. READ MORE: Donald Trump slams 'archaic' US constitution that is 'really bad' for the country (Independent) And: Trump vs. the Constitution: A Guide (Politico)

LibertarianInstitute: Donald Trump is a lot of things; a fan of the Constitution isn’t one of them. Throughout his relatively short time as president Donald Trump has verbally assaulted no less than five amendments. Most of these have come in the form of an ill-conceived tweet and haven’t actually led to any policy changes, but that doesn’t change the fact that the man sitting in the Oval Office has a total disregard for the founding charter of our national government.

President Trump’s disrespect for the Constitution goes even further and gets even more insidious. He has gone so far as to pardon authorities that violated the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens. Sheriff Joe Arpaio was found guilty of violating the Fourth Amendment through racial profiling and unlawful searches and seizures. It’s extremely dangerous for the president of the United States to pardon someone of such crimes and to normalize this behavior. The president should uphold the Constitution and seek to remove those that violate it, not pardon them or reward them.

Recent amendments to come under fire by the president are the Second and Fifth Amendments. After the Parkland shootings, the president stated that he would like to “take the guns first, go through due process second”. What he’s saying is that he would like to waive due process, which would violate the Fifth Amendment, and take people’s guns away without a conviction of any crime. Taking someone’s firearms away without any due process would be stripping them of their Second Amendment rights. This is an especially interesting thing to hear from a Republican president, considering the importance Republicans place on the Second Amendment, it further proves the total disregard this president has for the Constitution. When even the Second Amendment isn’t sacred to a Republican president, there’s something very troubling going on.

The President’s oath of office states that he will defend the Constitution, not dismiss it.

When Obama was caught red handed by Edward Snowden's revelations on Meta data spying it was judge Brett Kavanaugh who came to Obama's defense claiming that Obama had not violated the fourth amendment when that is exactly what had happened. READ MORE: NSA metadata program “consistent” with Fourth Amendment, Kavanaugh once argued (ARS Technica) Brett Kavanaugh wrote in November 2015 in a case known as Klayman v. Obama:

"I do so because, in my view, the Government's metadata collection program is entirely consistent with the Fourth Amendment," Kavanaugh wrote. "Therefore, plaintiffs cannot show a likelihood of success on the merits of their claim, and this Court was right to stay the District Court's injunction against the Government’s program. The Government’s collection of telephony metadata from a third party such as a telecommunications service provider is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment, at least under the Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979). That precedent remains binding on lower courts in our hierarchical system of absolute vertical stare decisis."

Kavanaugh went further, saying that even if the Section 215 metadata program was a search, it should be considered "reasonable" in the name of national security. READ MORE: NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on (The Guardian)

The American people witness this slow-motion erosion of the Constitution and wonder, rightly, is any one ever going to be held accountable?

RawStory: The next step for the right-wing is a plot to change the U.S. Constitution to make it significantly more conservative by creating a Constitutional Convention among red states.

Article V in the US Constitution allows for two methods of amending the document. They can gather a two-thirds majority of Congress to propose an amendment and have it ratified by three-fourths of the states. The other option is having two-thirds of U.S. states call a constitutional convention and passing and ratifying amendments.

Business Insider reported about the effort encouraged by former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., who was kicked out of office in 2006 by nearly 18 points. But that loss doesn't mean that he can't force his will on the rest of the country.

BusinessInsider: Conservatives are just 15 states away from an unprecedented gathering that could rewrite large parts of the US Constitution and fundamentally change American life.

With Congress' initiative, the US Constitution has been amended 27 times. But never has the core American document been amended through a state-led process — the second track that the founders created under Article V of the Constitution.

The Convention of the States movement is just one of the organizations pushing for such a convention. But it's perhaps the best funded and has made the most recent progress — and has ties to former President Donald Trump's orbit, such as former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum and John Eastman, the conservative legal scholar who supported Trump's effort to overturn the election.

Five states — Wisconsin, South Carolina, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — have passed the organization's pro-convention resolution in the past two years.

Republicans pushing for a convention are playing the long game, similar to how they spent decades working to overturn the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

Since 2014, the Convention of States Project and other conservative groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have helped persuade lawmakers in 15 states to pass resolutions that call for a new constitutional convention.

Led by a prominent right-wing activist ― former Tea Party Patriots founder Mark Meckler, who is also the current acting CEO of Parler, a social media platform popular on the right ― the Convention of States Project has spread the gospel of a convention to an increasingly radical audience. This year, lawmakers proposed 42 Convention of States resolutions in at least 24 new states, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has long monitored the convention push.

The passage of those resolutions would trigger the provision in Article V of the Constitution that allows a convention to be called if 34 states demand it. Backers of another resolution ― one that calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment ― have begun to argue that they have already reached that threshold. And last year, former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) began pushing Republican officials to sue Congress in an effort to force a convention call.

“I think if [Republicans] win the midterm elections, if they take the House and Senate, they will try to call an Article V convention immediately,” said David Super, a Georgetown University law professor who has closely followed the movement for a new convention. “It’s not a foregone conclusion that the simple Republican majority would get there, but if they get big majorities, I think they’ll try.”

Opponents, see a far more nefarious plot: a master class in astroturfing that could open the entire document up to a radical rewrite meant to serve the right-wing corporate interests that already dominate our politics, especially at the state level. The convention, they argue, could lead to the demolition of everything from the social safety net and environmental protections to civil rights laws. Or maybe even the Constitution itself.

“The First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment,” said Jay Riestenberg of Common Cause, a liberal group that campaigns against the calling of a convention. “Any civil rights, any constitutional protection in the Constitution could be up for grabs in this constitutional convention.”

A broad convention, Super has argued, could possibly write its own rules or even change the existing ratification process, and courts aren’t likely to intervene. They may not even have the authority to do so. So there is an inherent risk of a “runaway convention” that goes beyond its purported aim and opens up the entire Constitution to an overhaul.

Those fears were especially strong early on among conservatives who worried that special interest groups had foul intentions and that a convention would go awry the minute it began.

The Koch Connection to the Push For a Constitutional Convention

BillMoyers: Libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch have long opposed federal power and federal spending. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s biggest polluters and has been sanctioned and fined over and over again by both federal and state authorities. In response, the Kochs have launched a host of “limited government” advocacy organizations and have created a massive $400 million campaign finance network, fueled by their fortunes and those of their wealthy, right-wing allies, that rivals the two major political parties.

The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity says it favors a balanced budget convention. Such an austerity amendment would drastically cut the size of the federal government, threatening critical programs like Social Security and Medicare and eviscerating the government’s ability to respond to economic downturns, major disasters and the climate crisis.

The Convention of States Project’s source of funding is opaque, but its parent organization received more than $12 million from groups linked to brothers Charles and David Koch and other major conservative donors between 2010 and 2018, according to IRS filings reported by the Center for Media and Democracy and Splinter. The Mercer family, which through its foundation has showered tens of millions of dollars on right-wing causes over the last decade, has donated at least $500,000 to the group, CMD has reported.

Running the “Convention of States initiative” is an Austin, Texas-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). CSG reported revenue of $5.7 million in 2015, more than double its haul from two years earlier, when it launched its Convention of States Project, according to The Dallas News. It now boasts 115,000 “volunteers,” although that figure may represent the number of addresses on its email list.

The group is not required to disclose its donors, but research into other organizations’ tax records by the Center for Media and Democracy, Conservative Transparency and this author show a web of Koch-linked groups having provided nearly $5.4 million to CSG from the group’s founding in 2011 through 2015:

  • Donors Trust, a preferred secret money conduit for individuals and foundations in the Koch network of funders, has given CSG at least $790,000 since 2011.
  • The Greater Houston Community Foundation, which is funded by Donors Capital Fund (linked to Donors Trust) and the Kochs’ Knowledge and Progress Fund, has donated over $2 million since 2011.
  • The Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Donors Capital Fund, gave $2.5 million from 2012-13.

Citizens for Self-Governance also has two Koch-connected board members. Eric O’Keefe is a director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group which has taken in considerable funding from Koch-linked groups like the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and was at the center of the long-running “John Doe” criminal investigation of Scott Walker’s campaign coordination with dark money groups.

Grassroots conservative opponents of the convention, meanwhile, fear as Schlafly once did that the convention call is a backhanded way for special interests to advance their own plans. As one conservative activist who opposes the idea put it: Many movement conservatives want the government and federal courts to more aggressively adhere to an originalist interpretation of this Constitution, not throw it out altogether. Andy Biggs, the Arizona Republican congressman who has faced allegations that he helped organize the Capitol insurrection, strikes a similar note in a book he published in 2015 that described the convention plan as “a con.” 

Do yourself a favor. Think for yourself. Be your own person. Question everything. Stand for principle. Champion individual liberty and self-ownership where you can. Develop a strong moral code. Be kind to others. Do no harm, unless that harm is warranted. Pretty obvious stuff...but people who hold these things in their hearts seem to be disappearing from the earth at an accelerated rate. Stay safe, my friends. Thanks for being here.

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