The Constitutional Convention of 2016
Folks, this is pure fantasy. The question it raises is simple: What would a second U.S. constitution look like? How would it be worded to prevent the deliberate dismantling of our country and its institutions, and the slow disintegration that we are now witnessing?
Although stymied and wounded by the collapse of his explicit second-term goals as scandal after scandal bursts around him, Barack Obama presses on through 2013 and 2014 brazenly violating constitutional restraints. A compliant press continues to run interference for him, and those few jurors and legislators who still believe in the Constitution are scattered, demoralized, and impotent. Nobody listens to them and nobody carries out their lawful orders.
While the 2014 election is not crooked enough to restore a Democratic majority in the House, the party’s operatives are effective in stealing several closely contested Senate races, giving Harry Reid two more years of control over the upper chamber. In the lower house, despite gallant efforts by conservative representatives to conduct hearings into the growing backlog of Obama scandals, the media simply refuses to cover them more than cursorily. Outside of AM radio and certain now heavily spammed Internet sites, a blackout on news unfavorable to the Obama regime falls over the country.
By 2015, there are overt acts of resistance from various quarters. Accounts of mutinies and near-mutinies in some Marine, Navy, and Army ranks begin to be heard when the media miscalculates and publishes accounts of courts martial for disobedience. Hoping to demonstrate the danger that racist, sexist, and reactionary servicemen pose to a progressive republic, the media’s slanders backfire as large, spontaneous pro-military demonstrations erupt in red-state cities.
In the Dakotas, Idaho, Alaska, and Utah, rebellious legislatures vote to disobey federal environmental laws and racial quotas, vowing to grind down the federal court and prison system. In Lubbock, Texas, a group calling itself The Tree of Liberty openly calls for creation of a secessionist movement whose goal is to pry red states away from the Union. When the government attempts to arrest and try the group’s leaders for sedition, a second Waco occurs, with 21 federal agents and seven secessionists dead in a shootout at a farm outside of town. As a huge federal law enforcement presence descends on the countryside around Lubbock, The Tree of Liberty’s surviving leadership goes underground, broadcasting via illegal mobile land and sea-based radio stations.
Late in the year, citing precedents set by Abraham Lincoln when he set out to defend the Union against the southern rebellion, Barack Obama claims extraordinary executive powers and begins to assign military units to patrols and sweeps in states where legislatures have called for resistance to the federal government. Despite desperate attempts by some federal judges to thwart him, and calls in Congress for his impeachment, the president continues his coup with no resistance from Democrats, the ACLU, the Pentagon, or the media.
In February 2016, Texas Governor Rick Perry announces that his state has decided to initiate “a temporary secession” from the United States of America. He reveals that Texas has quietly acquired and sequestered an arsenal of advanced weaponry, including tanks, artillery, fighter jets, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft batteries, and most significantly, control over 300 nuclear warheads.
He declares a “no-fly zone” over Texas by U.S. military aircraft, forbidding them to enter the state under threat of interception and destruction. He forbids U.S. ground troops to cross the Texas border under threat of an unspecified retaliation against the city of Washington, DC.
After going into hiding, Perry delivers a televised address estimated to draw an audience of 150 million people. In it he lays out the reasons for the secession, beginning with a pledge not to use the weapons Texas has seized against the federal government in exchange for a six-month “truce.”
“We will use that time to host a constitutional convention to which we are inviting delegates from all of the states. Our intent will be to draft a new U.S. constitution that corrects the gaps and weaknesses of the first. It will prevent from happening again the kind of slow-rolling coup that has overtaken our country ever since the lobbyists, professional politicians, crony capitalists, unions, and leftists began wresting power from the people and turning it to their own narrow and selfish ends.”
He asks that each state send two delegates to form a body of “100 of the best and brightest among us” to deliberate on and formulate a draft constitution that can be taken back to the people of the United States as a template for a reformed and rebuilt federalism.
“The delegates must not and may not be nominated or sent by standing state governments or the Democratic or Republican parties. We are asking for private citizens who are willing to sign and publicly declare an oath of allegiance to the current constitution of the United States. Marxists, socialists, radical feminists, radical homosexualists, race baiters like Al Sharpton or Chris Matthews, Keynesian advocates, pacifists, Islamist apologists, global warming true believers, and similar extremists of all stripes will not be invited. The convention will be a conversation conducted by mature men and women whose philosophies and worldviews are based neither on naive assumptions about human nature and reality nor the advocacy of avaricious, power-hungry ideologies like Marxism or President Obama’s corporate fascism.”
Perry then asks the delegates to consider the following:
- What new amendments would they add to the Constitution and for what reasons?
- What current amendments would they expand upon, and how?
- How would they address such hot-button issues as abortion, euthanasia, homosexual “marriage,” Islam/sharia law, voting rights, education, welfare, citizenship, war powers, etc.?
The gavel has just dropped to call the convention to order. Where do we start?
