@UntimelyRippd

I suspect none of them would see the light of day in any Convention of the States rewrite ... especially since the States who have voted for a such convention are pretty much controlled by right wing politicians, often extremist right wingers and/or religious extremists.

This Convention of the States may very well happen, depending on the the outcome of the 2018 elections throughout the 50 states. As we know, the proponents of such a convention are very, very close to having the number of states required to call for a convention.

I feel there would be no popular uprising against the extremist Right controlling such a convention, and even if there were any uprising, it would be easily put down -- whether simply by propaganda or with the addition of violence, possibly military. It is not the Left that has the means of overcoming the propaganda; a handful of obscenely wealthy men control all our mainstream media and now, evidently, will control the Internet. In the case of violence, it is not the Left who is armed to the teeth; rather, the opposite is true. I do not believe we can count on the American military as they are shot-through with right-wingers -- especially the officer corps. Soldiers will do as they were trained to do: follow orders.

Wish I could be more hopeful, but it doesn't look too good to me. Naturally, all this could change in a moment. All it takes is a stock market meltdown, a wildly unexpected natural disaster, a crazy man with a nuke, etc and etc.

#7
need to rewrite the constitution.

The problem being, if we rewrote the constitution, we'd end up in a serious pissing match amongst various extremists (a category that probably includes myself), with the dupes of the oligarchs eventually holding sway.

We need the constitution to include some explicit "use cases", as we call them in software design. The "new" 14th amendment (due process etc.) needs to spell out some things that are simply not allowed -- like, seizing assets, then placing the burden of recovery on the citizen. Any assets seized need to be returned within the same time frame as is required for holding the person without charge. We need hard, written-in-ink limits to things like how long you can be held without trial, and the extent to which you can (or cannot) be held incommunicado. (Personally, I think every prisoner should be entitled to a daily 5-minute face-to-face check-in with someone whose job is protecting the prisoner, not the system. And I think those check-ins should be constitutionally-required to be documented and recorded. And I think the someone checking-in should be drawn from a pool of people working out of different offices, so that each prisoner meets with several different people who are not coworkers over the course of a couple of weeks. Because I think that if a society is going to do something as extraordinary and bizarre as locking someone up, that society has an enormous obligation to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the person being locked up.) The "new" 4th amendment needs to make it clear that this FISA nonsense won't fly, that we are secure in our electronic "property" (as "personal effects"); and that nationals of other countries are entitled to the same fundamental protections from the US government as are nationals of the US, because those protections are based, not on political expediencies or exigencies or some sort of birthright-by-geography, but on essential principles concerning what is and is not just. An extension of this would be an absolute prohibition on covert interference in the politics of another country, other than one with which the US Congress has declared a state of war -- with various specific and inviolable conditions concerning what a state of war entails and requires (e.g., a 100% embargo on all trade; divestment of all corporate subsidiaries that trade with the "enemy"; "repatriation" of any American subsidiaries of any transnational corporations that trade with the enemy, or worse, maintain subsidiaries in the enemy country. Though really, this is for me a concession -- I would ban the holding company altogether, so that the concept of "subsidiary" simply wouldn't exist, and I would ban the operation within the US of any corporation not registered and headquartered in the US. In other words, the complete and entire end of the transnational corporation. If you want to sell your goods in the US market, find an American distributor, or better still, license your technologies to an American manufacturer. And of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander -- I would not allow any American corporation to own property or have employees anywhere outside of US jurisdiction. Though maybe there would be exceptions for certain very specific types of enterprise -- e.g., journalism).

The constitution needs to spell out clearly a whole range of crimes that constitute "Sedition" (as opposed to Treason), sedition being:
a. the usurpation of state authority to carry out any agenda not subject to review by the duly-elected representatives of the republic, and ultimately, by the citizens themselves. This would include any and all malfeasant propaganda, whether directed domestically or abroad. Specifically, it would constitute sedition to deliberately misinform or disinform either the populace or the government of any nation, whether in official communication or in covertly-disseminated communication, and the penalties would be harsh, except, again, when there is a declared state of war between the US and the targets of the propaganda.
b. any effort to subvert the electoral process, whether by misinforming the public, or stealing ballots, or whatever. I need to be clear here: Sedition should be treated as a crime comparable to treason, with comparable penalties. As I've said more than once, I'm generally not big on the death penalty, but if you want to discuss it with me, you'll need to start by agreeing that the criteria to qualify would have encompassed the crimes of Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, et al. I'm not joking, and I'm not exaggerating: I will not even engage in the conversation if you think there are crimes that should be punished by death, but that those of North, Poindexter, Abrams, and Negroponte aren't in the set.

Note that my definition of sedition does not include public civil disobedience -- that is, a public refusal by a citizen or group of citizens to abide under state authority. Whatever you're guilty of, should you occupy wall street or barricade a farm that the sheriff is trying to repossess, it is not sedition. I am not defining sedition as any effort at all to undermine state authority, but only efforts to exercise state authority outside the parameters of a democratic republic, or to subvert the democratic republican process by which state authority is granted and exercised.

Concomitant with these explicit definitions of sedition, the use of Executive Pardon needs to be restricted and constrained, preventing the bizarre circumstance wherein an officer or agent of the government carries out seditious crimes, with either implicit or explicit direction from higher officers, and then gets pardoned by the executive under whom the agent operated. (One presumes that the original framers would have perceived such a pardon to be an obvious cause for impeachment, as well as such an outrage that no person holding the Presidency would have been willing to face the associated disgrace of behaving in such a fashion.)

The main point being that, contrary to the expectations of the men who originally negotiated this document, broad statements of essential rights are not sufficient to protect the interests of the average citizen -- or even the average pseudo-aristocrat -- from legally-enforced and sanctioned depredation. The broad statements must be accompanied by a suite of explicit cases that are explicitly noted as not being comprehensive, but only establishing a "space" that defines the most very minimum boundaries of personal security from state violence. Anyone with experience in the AI field of "Machine Learning" will understand exactly what I'm getting at here -- something called "Supervised Learning by Induction". Ideally, in fact, there would be both "positive" and "negative" cases: Here are examples of what the government absolutely cannot do. Here are examples of what the government absolutely can do. Judges then have three distinct types of decisions to make:
A. Is this case clearly within the parameters spelled out by one of the "use cases"?
B. If not, does it lie clearly within the space defined by some set of of the "use cases"?
C. If not -- if it sits somewhere in the no-man's land -- where should it be assigned: to expand the space of that which government can do, or the space of that which government cannot?

@UntimelyRippd @UntimelyRippd

I dunno, of course, but I suspect that the actual problem lies with the lawless corruption of those claiming to be 'above the law' themselves and running government in violation of the much-advertised Constitutional principles on which US law is to be based.

Be careful what you wish for.

http://billmoyers.com/story/alec-constitutional-convention/

ALEC Push for Constitutional Convention Hits a Roadblock of Infighting, Legal Questions

But the group continues to pursue a highly partisan, highly political agenda to rewrite the Constitution adding a fiscal austerity amendment to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

By Mary Bottari | August 3, 2017

With Republicans in control of 32 state legislatures, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been actively pushing the idea of a second Constitutional Convention to rewrite the US Constitution. The nation’s first and only Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia in 1787 with George Washington presiding.

ALEC has cheered on the idea of a “con con” for years, passing multiple resolutions calling for changes to the Constitution, hosting workshops and handbooks and even draft resolutions laying out proposed rules of procedure. Everything has been quite cordial and controlled. ...

...Because extreme Republican fiscal austerity advocates have not been able to get a “balanced budget” amendment through Congress, they have been pursuing the state-based avenue for several decades, with little success. ...

...Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG) is pushing the broadest of the three Article V applications, with a project called the “Convention of States.” Created in 2012 by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler and chaired by Wisconsin’s dark-money man Eric O’Keefe, CSG launched its ambitious effort to rewrite the Constitution in 2014. Its plan calls for a broad convention to propose multiple amendments to the Constitution that would give states the power to ignore federal laws and Supreme Court rulings they don’t like, slash federal spending and impose term limits. ALEC has adopted this idea as a model bill called the “Application for a Convention of the States Under Article V of the Constitution of the United States.” CSG’s budget more than tripled between 2011 and 2015 from $1.8 million in revenue to $5.7 million, and its proposal won passage in four states this year, for a total of 12 states. ...

...“CFA’s analysis flags important differences in the multiple versions of austerity resolutions passed by the states, and calls into serious question how close the Koch machine is to getting a crack at rewriting the Constitution,” said Arn Pearson, CMD’s general counsel. ...

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/inside-alec-corporate-push-cons...

Inside ALEC And The Corporate Push For A Constitutional Convention
By Josh Keefe @thejoshkeefe On 07/27/17

...Taylor spoke to International Business Times this week about what she saw at the ALEC conference, how it compared to years past, and the group’s call for a constitutional convention to write new amendments that would limit the power and largesse of the federal government. ...

...The two of us started going because we saw so many bills that we had never heard of, that people weren’t asking for, and they were coming from ALEC. That’s what I discovered in the process and that’s why I kept going — to get a heads-up on what the right is doing next, but also to expose where these policies come from. People should know these policies should be coming from them. The public isn’t asking for these policies. These corporations are working with right-wing think tanks and the legislators are the foot soldiers. ...

...The energy people are super happy though. They see tons of opportunity under Trump. But the big push was to amend the federal constitution using an Article V constitutional convention. There is a very vocal segment in ALEC that has concluded that the whole government is corrupt, even Republicans. So a new constitutional convention is the only way to get what they want, which is really a rollback of regulations and taxes. They have not been successful in getting Congress to pull back the social safety net and Medicare, to repeal the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, they haven’t got rid of the EPA. I believe that the Article V constitutional convention is a way to get those done in really sneaky ways. They don’t say to the public, “We don’t want the EPA, we don’t want Medicare.” They say that at the ALEC conference, but the public isn’t at the ALEC conference.

They have a really hard time repealing Medicare, because they have constituents that at least some of them care about. This is really an end run around them, around democracy in some ways. Because they don’t have faith in elected officials to accomplish ALEC’s priorities. And those priorities center around limiting the federal government’s ability to make policy and spend money. So an Article V constitutional convention is how they see they can finally curtail the power of the federal government. ...

...ALEC is known as a group that allows corporations to distribute model legislation to state lawmakers. Did you see that?

Absolutely. Just look at Article V. The first rollout of that, when there was really a push for it was my first ALEC conference in 2013. And sitting a few rows in front of me was Chris Kapenga. (Republican Wisconsin state Sen. Kapenga recently sponsored a resolution in the Wisconsin legislature calling for a constitutional convention to introduce a balanced budget amendment. It passed the assembly.) We were told that we needed an Article V convention and we were told to bring this back to our states. I said to myself at the time, “We are definitely going to see this in Wisconsin.” This was in August 2013. By January 2014, he introduced a balanced budget amendment. He didn’t get that idea out of the sky. ...

http://billmoyers.com/story/kochs-to-rewrite-constitution/

Koch Brothers Bankroll Move to Rewrite the Constitution

A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely.

By Alex Kotch | March 27, 2017

...There are two major legislative pushes for a convention at the state level. One would attempt to engineer a convention for a balanced budget amendment only, and the other tries to secure an open convention for the purpose of limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. But once a convention is underway, all bets are off. The convention can write its own rules, resulting in a wide-open or “runaway” convention that can make major changes to the constitution and, some argue, even change the number of states required to ratify those changes.

If America gets saddled with a runaway convention, the Koch coterie of funders will be to blame. Most of the groups pushing the convention idea are being underwritten by one or more institutions tied to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Attempts to Limit Topic of the Convention Likely to Fail ...

...The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains why any convention call, no matter how narrowly written, is likely to result in a “runaway” convention. A convention is empowered to write its own rules, including how delegates are chosen, how many delegates attend and whether a supermajority is required to approve amendments.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents a convention, once convened, from setting its own agenda, influenced by powerful special interests like the Koch groups. A convention could even choose an entirely new ratification process. “The 1787 convention ignored the ratification process under which it was established and created a new one, reducing the number of states needed to approve the new Constitution and removing Congress from the approval process,” writes CBPP. ...

Edit: lol, should have guessed that I'd have been multiply ninja'd, including by the person I replied to, but will leave the articles for any 'drive-by' readers who might be interested in why this has to be fought tooth and nail.

#7
need to rewrite the constitution.

The problem being, if we rewrote the constitution, we'd end up in a serious pissing match amongst various extremists (a category that probably includes myself), with the dupes of the oligarchs eventually holding sway.

We need the constitution to include some explicit "use cases", as we call them in software design. The "new" 14th amendment (due process etc.) needs to spell out some things that are simply not allowed -- like, seizing assets, then placing the burden of recovery on the citizen. Any assets seized need to be returned within the same time frame as is required for holding the person without charge. We need hard, written-in-ink limits to things like how long you can be held without trial, and the extent to which you can (or cannot) be held incommunicado. (Personally, I think every prisoner should be entitled to a daily 5-minute face-to-face check-in with someone whose job is protecting the prisoner, not the system. And I think those check-ins should be constitutionally-required to be documented and recorded. And I think the someone checking-in should be drawn from a pool of people working out of different offices, so that each prisoner meets with several different people who are not coworkers over the course of a couple of weeks. Because I think that if a society is going to do something as extraordinary and bizarre as locking someone up, that society has an enormous obligation to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the person being locked up.) The "new" 4th amendment needs to make it clear that this FISA nonsense won't fly, that we are secure in our electronic "property" (as "personal effects"); and that nationals of other countries are entitled to the same fundamental protections from the US government as are nationals of the US, because those protections are based, not on political expediencies or exigencies or some sort of birthright-by-geography, but on essential principles concerning what is and is not just. An extension of this would be an absolute prohibition on covert interference in the politics of another country, other than one with which the US Congress has declared a state of war -- with various specific and inviolable conditions concerning what a state of war entails and requires (e.g., a 100% embargo on all trade; divestment of all corporate subsidiaries that trade with the "enemy"; "repatriation" of any American subsidiaries of any transnational corporations that trade with the enemy, or worse, maintain subsidiaries in the enemy country. Though really, this is for me a concession -- I would ban the holding company altogether, so that the concept of "subsidiary" simply wouldn't exist, and I would ban the operation within the US of any corporation not registered and headquartered in the US. In other words, the complete and entire end of the transnational corporation. If you want to sell your goods in the US market, find an American distributor, or better still, license your technologies to an American manufacturer. And of course, what's good for the goose is good for the gander -- I would not allow any American corporation to own property or have employees anywhere outside of US jurisdiction. Though maybe there would be exceptions for certain very specific types of enterprise -- e.g., journalism).

The constitution needs to spell out clearly a whole range of crimes that constitute "Sedition" (as opposed to Treason), sedition being:
a. the usurpation of state authority to carry out any agenda not subject to review by the duly-elected representatives of the republic, and ultimately, by the citizens themselves. This would include any and all malfeasant propaganda, whether directed domestically or abroad. Specifically, it would constitute sedition to deliberately misinform or disinform either the populace or the government of any nation, whether in official communication or in covertly-disseminated communication, and the penalties would be harsh, except, again, when there is a declared state of war between the US and the targets of the propaganda.
b. any effort to subvert the electoral process, whether by misinforming the public, or stealing ballots, or whatever. I need to be clear here: Sedition should be treated as a crime comparable to treason, with comparable penalties. As I've said more than once, I'm generally not big on the death penalty, but if you want to discuss it with me, you'll need to start by agreeing that the criteria to qualify would have encompassed the crimes of Oliver North, John Poindexter, Elliot Abrams, et al. I'm not joking, and I'm not exaggerating: I will not even engage in the conversation if you think there are crimes that should be punished by death, but that those of North, Poindexter, Abrams, and Negroponte aren't in the set.

Note that my definition of sedition does not include public civil disobedience -- that is, a public refusal by a citizen or group of citizens to abide under state authority. Whatever you're guilty of, should you occupy wall street or barricade a farm that the sheriff is trying to repossess, it is not sedition. I am not defining sedition as any effort at all to undermine state authority, but only efforts to exercise state authority outside the parameters of a democratic republic, or to subvert the democratic republican process by which state authority is granted and exercised.

Concomitant with these explicit definitions of sedition, the use of Executive Pardon needs to be restricted and constrained, preventing the bizarre circumstance wherein an officer or agent of the government carries out seditious crimes, with either implicit or explicit direction from higher officers, and then gets pardoned by the executive under whom the agent operated. (One presumes that the original framers would have perceived such a pardon to be an obvious cause for impeachment, as well as such an outrage that no person holding the Presidency would have been willing to face the associated disgrace of behaving in such a fashion.)

The main point being that, contrary to the expectations of the men who originally negotiated this document, broad statements of essential rights are not sufficient to protect the interests of the average citizen -- or even the average pseudo-aristocrat -- from legally-enforced and sanctioned depredation. The broad statements must be accompanied by a suite of explicit cases that are explicitly noted as not being comprehensive, but only establishing a "space" that defines the most very minimum boundaries of personal security from state violence. Anyone with experience in the AI field of "Machine Learning" will understand exactly what I'm getting at here -- something called "Supervised Learning by Induction". Ideally, in fact, there would be both "positive" and "negative" cases: Here are examples of what the government absolutely cannot do. Here are examples of what the government absolutely can do. Judges then have three distinct types of decisions to make:
A. Is this case clearly within the parameters spelled out by one of the "use cases"?
B. If not, does it lie clearly within the space defined by some set of of the "use cases"?
C. If not -- if it sits somewhere in the no-man's land -- where should it be assigned: to expand the space of that which government can do, or the space of that which government cannot?