Quote:
Originally Posted by EricOKC
This is where your argument falls apart. Note the section in bold? The alteration (the creation of the US Constitution) WAS agreed to by the Congress of the United States, and said agreement was confirmed by the legislatures of every state. That agreement was to call a Constitutional Convention to draw up a new Constitution.
|
Wrong, on at least two counts. First, the agreement to call a Constitutional Convention was not, itself, an amendment to the Articles of Confederation. The proposed Constitution itself, not the agreement to call a convention to do something about the problem, was the amendment to the Articles that this language applies to. And second, the Constitution was NOT confirmed by the state legislatures, but by state conventions, which is not the way that the Articles stipulated amendments needed to be affirmed.
Quote:
|
This is simply saying if 9 of the state constitutional conventions ratify the Constitution it would become the new law of the land. The NEW document, by abolishing the old document, sets its own standards.
|
Either the new document constitutes a legally-achieved amendment of the old one, or it does not. There is no provision for saying, "Well, this amendment is actually a completely new blueprint for government, so we don't have to follow the existing law in putting it into place. We've written our own new procedure for doing that and since this is a new government, the new procedure applies." BZZZZTT! It's NOT a new government yet, dudes! It's only a
proposed new government! Right now, we still have the old one, it's provisions not the new ones are in force, and you have to do it by the old rules. Once you accomplish that, then OK, we have a new government and the new rules will apply, but only then.
I'll give you an analogy. Suppose that somebody wanted to scrap the Constitution and adopt a unitary government in place of our current federation. So all pretenses to sovereignty on the part of the states would be done away with, the governments of the states would become agencies of the federal government responsible for administration of the state territory and population. (This would be just as huge a change as the Constitution, which replaced a confederation with a federation.) By some miracle this passes Congress with a two-thirds majority. According to the procedure for amendments spelled out in the Constitution, it should now be submitted to the state legislatures or conventions for ratification, and would become law only when enough states had said OK.
But now it's decided that, "Well, you know, this new government abolishes state sovereignty. From now on the U.S. is no longer a federal system, but rather a unitary government, so what the state legislatures want means doodly-squat. Instead, what we're going to do is submit the whole thing to a national plebiscite. We'll hold an election on the matter in six months, and what the people say goes."
Not Kosher, is it? When you're replacing the Constitution, what you're doing is amending it (drastically), and so you need to follow the procedure for amending the Constitution. 2/3 vote in both houses of Congress, check, but now you need to submit it to the states, not to a national popular vote. Once the states have approved this amendment, then sure, in the future you can amend the new Constitution via popular vote if that's the procedure written into it. But not beforehand, because what's being decided is whether it's ever going to be the new government at all.
Same with the Constitution. It needed to be voted on by the Congress of the United States (which it was), and then submitted to the state legislatures and ratified by all 13 of them (which it wasn't).
Thus, it's not constitutional. We are living under an illegal government.
