Republicans would need control of at least 34 state legislatures to be able to call such a convention, and 37 to ratify any amendments.
So far they have unified control of 31 state legislatures. Of those 31, 19 have signed onto an application for an Article V Convention put forward by Convention of States, a conservative activist group.
https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservative-scholar-states-2022-8
https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7
Poking the us with a stick and saying "Balkanize" over and over
Yes, but in what world could you imagine the democrats reaching across the aisle for something so incredibly unpopular? :jokerfied:
All worlds. Even with the multiverse theory, I just don't see a universe where Dems do the right thing. They'll sign on and let the Republicans run roughshod over the constitution all for a promise of a favor to get a park named after Colon Powell
Suddenly reminded of the time that Schumer agreed to 40 of Trump's judicial nominees in exchange for naming a building after John McCain
lmao I forgot about that. They did it right before the Kavanaugh hearing too
Then it just becomes an oil field named after GW during the final negotiations
And MSNBC explains how that was actually great
I don't think anyone would have predicted the DNC abandoning all state level parties back a decade ago, but it happened.
The plan to call a constitutional convention by gaining control over state legislatures has been a plan decades in the making by Right Wing Billionaires. Nancy MacLean wrote about it in Democracy in Chains. Fascinating read.
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
This has been the case for like a decade now. They were actually closer around 2017.
Don't be so jaded about it. There's a lot of horrific stuff they could do.
- amendment that states that heterosexual marriage is the only legitimate type of marriage
- amendment that gets rid of birthright citizenship
- amendment that reverses the Immigration Act of 1965 and implements racial & religious selection criteria for immigrants
- amendment that bans abortion nationally
- several amendments that would be aimed at making the education system more conservative, like:
- bringing back (Christian) prayer in public schools
- voucherizing school systems
- banning "critical race theory"
- putting strict ideological restrictions on teachers and college professors
- amendment that bans progressive income tax (i.e. in order for an income tax to be legal, it has to be a flat tax)
- amendment that bans gender-affirming treatments for trans people
They could do so much worse than that. They could re-institute slavery (aside from the 13th amendment). They could make Evangelicalism the only legal religion. They could strip citizenship and human rights from queer people. They could ban the Democrats as a party and make the GOP the only legal party. Pick the worst Nazi shit you can imagine.
This is correct. They could literally do anything. But realistically, the chuds who are all about re-writing the constitution are all about limiting the federal government to basically just a military. So environmental regulation, Social Security, etc, would all be gone. Universal healthcare would be impossible. They essentially want 50 different nations with a mutual defense pact (or really, 50 states united by global imperialism).
They essentially want 50 different nations with a mutual defense pact
Something that I think about once in a while is that conservatives love capitalism and they praise the benefits of industrialization, but they also love localism, resent "multiculturalism" and put a lot of emphasis on the distinctions between the 50 states. And they don't seem to realize that capital accumulation (and the related development of more and more complicated global supply chains & information/media systems) is exactly what has diminished the importance of local cultural differences.
They get angry when liberals & leftists say things like "the states aren't really that essentially different from each other when it comes to how you experience life", or "state distinctions don't matter anymore" or "all suburbs are kinda the same", but I think that conservatives know deep down that the liberals & leftists are kinda right about this.
I'm not sure that the mapping between local bourgeois and the Republican party is exactly that neat. There are plenty of bankers and corpos who are in deep with the Republicans and wouldn't stand to gain from signing on to the Alex Jones platform.
That's what I hope anyway. I've been thinking lately that the neolibs who have been at the helms of both parties for 50 years are actually sort of progressive, in a way. No matter how painful the culture war gets, at least the capitalists can't help but gradually hollow out their own strength by financializing everything and consolidating and outsourcing and optimizing. Everything gets bigger and the TRPF stirs in its sleep. But if we have some great reset with local bourgeois temporarily making gains in their intra-bourgeois power struggles, breaking up corporations and reducing the torrential flows of government money into the "wrong" bourgeois pockets, then that could tend to turn back the clock in a world-historical sense. We could be farther from economic collapse than ever, while still losing the culture war. Not fun to think about.
I'm not sure I'm really on the right track with this train of thought but that's what's been going on in this little brain :blob-no-thoughts:
The country would cease to exist, there's no way thr west coast or the northeast would remain under those terms.
I don’t expect democrats in power to do anything, but if they did all of that and the California Dems didn’t do something I think they might actually get a sudden revolution. Which may be a disaster but I just don’t think the people of cities of California would tolerate that, and I have a very low expectation of Americans c
Its really hard to say, because I think functionally 99% of americans have no understanding of how this stuff works, how to organize with a union, how a general strike works, etc. I think what you'd see is just a series of disconnected left wing gatherings that get shot by police or newly empowered militias.
I suspect a constitutional convention would ban 'communism' in order to justify executing dissidents.
If the GOP gets to re-write the constitution then Balkanization would be one of the better possible outcomes.
Time to revive the old Norwegian black metal tradition and burning some fucking churches
i've said it before; norwegian black metal bands may have a lot of shit beliefs, but they have one very good one and it involves churches
Love to compose a bill of rights and spend the next 250 years figuring out ways to go around it
I think that because the Holocaust was so insanely, unambiguously, brutally evil, sometimes people, myself included, have trouble remembering and truly understanding it was an actual thing that happened and that it could happen again.
Like obviously I know it happened, but the idea that could happen here, to me and/or people I know, is so far from the life I know that it almost seems impossible. But obviously it’s not.
Err bro. If you live in North America, you reside on a land inherited from a mass State endorsed genocide. The US was an apartheid state up till the 60s and 70s. A third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized between the 30s and 70s. Almost 25% of indigenous women in the Us were sterilized in the 60s and 70s. There've been American Holocausts since the founding of the USA. Almost al of US medical knowledge comes from hideous experiments done on African Americans or inherited from Nazi or Japanese experiments on their captives.
The life that is portrayed is just a thin veneer on top of the evils that are purposely not taught...
:harold-manic:I’m very aware of all of that but those all fall in that exact same feeling of “I know these things are possible because they’ve happened, but since nothing I’ve ever seen in my life is even a fraction as horrifying I don’t even know how to understand the possibility”
I guess that works for most people. My first year in the US, I had people showing me nooses from their cars and threatening to lynch me, so our viewpoints might be somewhat dissimilar. I think if you are visibly non-white, or visibly not gender conforming/ hetero, the feeling is quite a bit different. I've always felt since then that it wouldn't take much for the mask to slip if society took a few steps back..
I stood in line for 7 hours to vote last time, and those voting rights are not coming back. It's a death of social democracy by a thousand small cuts..
The whole conservative movement's stated goal is to go back to their "good old days", which only were good for white, property owning, males. And they've never stopped working for that.
Ugh, I know exactly what you mean. I wish I knew what to call it. I feel like I oscilate between my rational part of my brain thinking "The hammer is coming down, it's about to happen here, get the fuck out ASAP" and some other part of my brain being like "What? Here? But my day to day life hasn't really changed, how could this all be up-ended so quickly? Is overt fascism really just a couple years away?" Obviously it's where we're headed, it just doesn't feel real some days.
the good side is that Jews were like, 1% of the German population, and Non-White people are like 35% of the US population
I just hope more of that 35% buys guns while it's still possible
Dirty tricks? Assassinations? Or the Democrats could just fuck up so bad that they lose key states.
It's one possible avenue for the GOP to bring about the end of the world (America Edition).
A quick look at historical election maps on 270towin just shows how volatile political control of the states can be. There's no particular reason to think that Republicans couldn't engineer wave that would sweep through enough states to trigger a constitutional convention.
It's very sobering and upsetting wrestling with the reality that "progress" and "The arc of history bends towards justice" and similar sentiments are just some bullshit people made up, and there's actually nothing except some very mortal and fragile people standing between any kind of stable and peaceful life and absolutely horrific depravity. And historically we mostly lose that fight sooner or later.
It's interesting that MLK said the whole "arc of history" thing. He of all people understood how justice doesn't just happen, it's something fought for.
Kind of weird for him to pull out the whig historiography when he of all people knew how historically wrong it was. Like chattel slavery died out with the Roman Empire and then got brought back by bloodthirsty Christians to fuck over West African people in particular. That long arc of history most certainly did not bend towards justice.
If you think you can win your struggle, it helps to tell people that victory is inevitable. To quote Eugene Debs, "You can accelerate [socialist revolution] or removed it, but you cannot avoid it."
Only some double agent shenigans would be enough, and that would require extraordinary coordination over decades
Just like overturning Roe V Wade right?
Michigan use to be a “guaranteed blue state” now every county north of the capital is Republican controlled in every level of government.
Republicans can make it happen
Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Virginia, New Jersey, Maine. MN and VA are the only ones that are close to flipping, but the others are still distantly within the scope of plausibility over the next 10 years.
I have gone full doomer at this point and have decided to just give up. I am going to be hunted like a deer and there is nothing I can do about it.
I fucking hate existing, no wonder these morons want us to go extinct so badly. I wish I was never born.
Surround yourself with loved ones and unplug for a while. Good news is that others will always be there to keep picking up the bloomer torch.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
At risk of sounding accelerationist, go ahead and delegitimize that shit you fucking hogs.
:this:
If nothing else, watching Greg Abbott and the geriatric ALEC losers try to completely hack apart the Constitution into some Corporate wet dream will make for entertaining television.
But when you've already got six SCOTUS judges, I'm not even sure why they'd bother. Other than the spectacle of a new Constitutional Convention that's chaired by Donald Trump, its unnecessary when you've got six judges who will just do whatever the highest bidder wants.
Yeah great point about the judiciary. It is kind of an unwise move for them tactically considering they can already do whatever they want and have it declared constitutional.
My high school history teacher was warning about this 15 + years ago
think that whole "thou shalt not kill" bit is going to be kind of a big issue
naw what am i saying, they'll probably just append "white christians" to the end and call it a day
white christians
That's how Christian governments have pretty much always interpreted it. And really it should translate something like "Though shall not commit murder" or "Though shalt not commit unlawful killing". It was never a blanket prohibition on killing people.
Even before "governments" were really a thing and it was just a dude with cavalry who demanded a portion of your grain
When pope urban declared the first crusade one of his primary arguments was "stop killing each other and start killing dudes over there"
When it's a crime to covet your neighbor's ass, only criminals will covet asses.
