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

  • kristina [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Neat, not sure how they'd make it worse than the original though

    • join_the_iww [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      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
      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • star_wraith [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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).

          • join_the_iww [he/him]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            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.

          • soft [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            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:

        • Commander_Data [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The country would cease to exist, there's no way thr west coast or the northeast would remain under those terms.

            • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
              ·
              2 years ago

              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

              • grey_wolf_whenever [he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                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.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            If the GOP gets to re-write the constitution then Balkanization would be one of the better possible outcomes.

        • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Time to revive the old Norwegian black metal tradition and burning some fucking churches

          • Mindfury [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            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

    • copandballtorture [ey/em]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Love to compose a bill of rights and spend the next 250 years figuring out ways to go around it

      • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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.

        • redladadriver [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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:

          • ClimateChangeAnxiety [he/him, they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            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”

            • redladadriver [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              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.

        • Azarova [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          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.

      • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Worse than slavery and one of the biggest genocides? Idk