Sundering the Union + Constitution in "Crisis" + Convention of States(Article V)

[Karlysymon]

Republicans' next big play is to 'scare the hell out of Washington' by rewriting the Constitution. And they're willing to play the long game to win.

https://www.businessinsider.com/politics/republicans-next-big-play-is-to-scare-the-hell-out-of-washington-by-rewriting-the/dfe74ew

DeSantis stokes more speculation about his political future with South Carolina visit

DeSantis' visit to South Carolina came four days before the GOP presidential primary, stoking speculation that he still wants the national spotlight.

www.usatoday.com

In a press release afterward, the governor's office said "DeSantis was invited by the U.S. Term Limits organization to travel to meet with legislative leaders to encourage the passage of state resolutions calling for term limits on members of Congress."

 

[Karlysymon]

Most Californians believe they'd be happier if state seceded

A new survey revealed a majority of Californians feel they'd be happier if their state was no longer a part of the United States.

www.newsweek.com

California secession movement wants national divorce to avoid "civil war"

Conservative activist Louis Marinelli told Newsweek that a national divorce would be an "alternative to potential civil violence."

www.newsweek.com

 

[Karlysymon]

Efforts to bust out of the union are gathering steam from California to Texas

Secessionists are big in Texas right now, but one state wants out more

Calls for Texas to secede from the US are growing louder, with advocates saying the state could then stop migrant flows from Mexico without being hamstrung by the federal government.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Karlysymon]

For the first time in its sixteen-year history, CFR’s annual Preventive Priorities Survey found that the leading concern among foreign policy experts lies within U.S. borders: the possibility of domestic terrorism and political violence in the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

 

[Karlysymon]

ALEC Policy Summit Features Push to Legally Force a Constitutional Convention - EXPOSEDbyCMD

State lawmakers, corporate lobbyists, and right-wing operatives got together in Scottsdale, Arizona last week for the 2023 States and Nation Policy Summit hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The summit — one of the largest annual gatherings of the ALEC faithful, along...

www.exposedbycmd.org

"ALEC used this most recent policy summit to double down on a strategy first presented in 2020 claiming that unrelated and outdated state resolutions should be counted to meet the threshold of the 34 state calls needed to hold a constitutional convention. Using this rationale, the threshold was reached in 1979, making Congress legally required to convene a constitutional convention immediately.

U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX) presented the bill he has introduced (HCR 24) to do just that, claiming Congress has “failed in its constitutional duty to count applications and call a ‘Convention for proposing Amendments.’”

“Working with my friend and our fearless leader in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, I’m going to continue to push to pass this important legislation to stave off a sovereign debt crisis, to rein in the reckless and wasteful spending in Washington, and to return power back to the sovereign states,” Arrington said.

David Walker, former comptroller general of the U.S., discussed steps being taken to force the issue in the courts. “The Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation (of which I’m a board member) has financed the drafting of a declaratory judgment filing by a prominent D.C. firm with significant Supreme Court experience,” Walker explained. He noted that several states are considering whether to file a case against Congress with the goal being “to get a case before the Supreme Court to force the Congress to discharge its constitutional responsibilities. We need more states to join this effort.”

Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory (R) also called on ALEC lawmakers to urge the Supreme Court to act. “Please join us in the state of Utah as we look into the legal mechanisms that we have under the Constitution… to declare that Congress must count the applications,” Ivory implored. “And if, as we believe, we’ve already achieved 34 applications to Congress for a fiscal responsibility convention, call [it]… and hold a Convention of States.”

In a workshop titled “Article V: The People’s Voice and State’s Empowerment Tool,” ALEC lawmakers heard from “legal experts” who delved “into the merits of a Declaratory Judgment suit against Congress, specifically addressing its negligence since 1979 in calling a Convention for an inflation-fighting Fiscal Responsibility Amendment.”

Members of ALEC’s Federalism and International Relations Task Force heard a similar presentation called “Article V — Next Steps If the 34-State Threshold Was Met in 1979.”
Task force members then took a secret vote on a Resolution Demanding Congress Call the Fiscally Responsible Amendment Convention as Article V Mandated in 1979 Stipulating Ratification by State Convention, where “We the People Rule.” This resolution not only calls on Congress to hold a constitutional convention, it requires the states’ governors, attorneys general, and legislative councils “to seek judicial enforcement” if they fail to do so.

New York Legislature votes to undo prior requests for U.S. constitutional convention

Mar. 21—ALBANY — The New York Legislature has rescinded all prior requests for a constitutional convention to amend the U.S. Constitution, a move that leading Democrats say will prevent those calls from being misinterpreted to call for a convention now. In concurrent votes in the Assembly and...

www.yahoo.com

 

[Karlysymon]

Civil War director Alex Garland on why his film is ‘just reporting’

Alex Garland, the director of Civil War, about a near-future America at war with itself, talks about making a film that foreshadows the breakdown of society while avoiding tying it to current events.

www.scmp.com

Western democracies, he says, can lean too much on their sense of exceptionalism. To him, Civil War is not an act of cynicism. It is a warning shot.

“The consequences of it are so serious that to not take the threat seriously would, itself, be another kind of insanity,” says Garland. “It would just be complacent.”

Americans are turning to stories of civil war, real and imagined

The real risks America faces are more insidious

www.economist.com

For some Americans, then, “Civil War” offers a horrifying vision of the future. “This isn’t just a film. It’s a premonition,” one person wrote underneath the trailer on YouTube. Trump fans have declared that the movie is “predictive programming” as “there will be a civil war after they use illegals to steal the 2024 election.”

The film joins a burgeoning genre: writers are gripped by the idea of a second American civil war. In a novel from 2017 by Omar El Akkad, some southern states secede after the federal government bans fossil fuels. In “DMZ” (2022), a miniseries, America is divided between the United States and the secessionist Free States.

In “Flyover”, an absorbing novel by Douglas Kennedy which came out last year in France (it is awaiting publication in English), the United States has been succeeded by the United Republic and the United Confederacy. The United Republic is an offshoot of the Democratic Party and a purported bastion of progressivism on the coasts; the United Confederacy, its Republican counterpart, is a Christian theocracy spanning the Midwest and the South. “What I am trying to do is just say, ‘Pay attention here,’” Mr Kennedy reflects.

It is not just storytellers, either. Academics have also been ringing alarm bells in books such as “How Civil Wars Start” (2022) by Barbara Walter, a political scientist, and “The Next Civil War” (2022) by Stephen Marche, an essayist. Both assert that the Union is in a fragile, rancorous state. “The United States is a textbook example of a country headed towards civil war,” Mr Marche has claimed, pointing to, among other things, Americans’ lack of faith in the merits of democracy. (According to the Pew Research Centre, a pollster, last year public trust in the federal government reached a near-record low.)

 

[Karlysymon]

Imagine how the constitutional convention will play out with people like these as delegates to the convention

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1763218444646744428

 

[Karlysymon]

The Actual Civil War Was Also Preceded by Fiction That Imagined, “What if America Had a Civil War?”

Before our actual Civil War, authors busied themselves imagining bloodshed.

www.yahoo.com

....Alex Garland’s much-ballyhooed Civil War stands out for its eagerness to exploit popular fears of mass political violence without offering any meaningful reflection on the underlying factors that have led to it. Experience it in IMAX! the promotional poster urges, in a tone that sits uncomfortably with the director’s claim that he made the film as a warning of what could occur if we are not careful. If the past is any guide, such macabre depictions of what Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore” may only accustom us to the likelihood that it will.

Obsessing about a potential future civil war was a favorite activity of Americans in the years before they ventured into the fields to murder one another en masse. As the crisis over slavery deepened, a bumper crop of new novels depicted a Southern breakaway movement and a bloody conflict with the North. The books’ authors tended not to deplore the possibility but to welcome it. They wanted readers to envision, from the safety of their armchairs, what the destruction of the nation would look like—and to help bring it on.

Only about 400 readers bothered to pick up Ruffin’s overwrought novel, much to the author’s chagrin. That might have been because the future he anticipated was already becoming a reality. In the novel, South Carolina seizes Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor—just where the actual fighting would begin only months after the publication of Ruffin’s book, when the 67-year-old author, a volunteer with the militia, was himself given the high honor of firing one of the first shots in the war he had fantasized about with such pleasure.

The unfathomable devastation that ensued, leaving three-quarters of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more wounded in body and mind, and much of the South a smoldering ruin, took the fun out of imagining what a nation-rending conflict would look like. The genre disappeared for a time. Ruffin shot himself in the head after the surrender at Appomattox. The reality of Southern secession hadn’t matched up to the turgid fantasies of his fiction.

 

[Karlysymon]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1781404269800788253

 

[Karlysymon]

Twitter roasts Washington Post's Max Boot for his call to ‘abolish the electoral college’

Author and Washington Post columnist Max Boot brought a tidal wave of condemnations upon himself when he called to abolish the Electoral College on the evening before July 4th.

www.foxnews.com

Boot linked to his Sunday column in which he argued for the Electoral College to be abolished and for senators to be elected proportional to their population, despite the House of Representatives already being a chamber of Congress that is elected proportional to the population.

"We should abolish the Electoral College and make the election of senators proportional to population. Let the will of the people prevail. We should – but we won’t. Small states will block any constitutional amendment that would strip them of their outsize power," he wrote.

Boot, who identified as a conservative prior to the election of former President Trump, joined the growing chorus of progressives calling to remove the Electoral College. While some progressives have also called for the Senate to be abolished, Boot doesn't go that far and instead claims it's unfair smaller states have the same number of senators as larger states.

Actor Adam Baldwin asked Boot a simple question.

"’Abolish the Electoral College’ by what constitutional process, Max?," Baldwin tweeted.

Earlier this week, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) decided not to veto an obscure law called the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPV), which calls for the state's 4 Electoral College votes to be awarded to the presidential candidate who gets the most votes nationally regardless of the outcome in the state. The law doesn't go into effect, however, until states totaling 270 electoral votes join the compact. That's the number of Electoral College votes required to win the presidency. Once dismissed as an unworkable, almost farcical fantasy, the NPV just tallied its 209th electoral vote with Maine, and now has a clear path to victory. And that means that the Electoral College as we know it might not survive past the 2024 election cycle.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1781274457991975419