I didn’t say it would be easy, but something drastic must be done to reverse the currently anti-Constitutional situation Americans must face.

I used to live in John Linder’s Congressional Barony and still get amazed when the news chatterers announce the Congressman will visit us on {pick some date}. Neal Boortz is an intelligent man, but his ego is even bigger than a Congresstitute’s. The Fair Tax, since it does not expect a Constitutional Convention to repeal the 16th Amendment would result in exactly what you describe.

Minorities would actually make out better since the current gerrymandered Baronies would likely be 100% in some cases. As to a Congresstitute’s salary, they have an automatic pay raise every two years. Currently their salary is 150 – 250% higher than the serfs in their Baronies.

As to repeal of the 17th, if State Government can show the direct election of Senators has lessened the State’s influence in Washington, the local voting public may well come around. Show me one serf in a Senator’s Duchy that has any influence.

Doctor Zero on April 23, 2009 at 1:49 AM

Middle America is sprawled in a threadbare seat, grey and tired before its time, eyes filmed over by visions of helplessness and fear. We need a white wizard to shock him out of his stupor, and remind him of who he is, and what he’s truly capable of.

There are so many willing to play Gandalf, and too few willing to be Frodo.

The glamorous and the glorious are alluring temptations for actors of all kinds. Far less appealing is the lonely burden of bearing a moral compass, a conscience, and personal responsibility.

At first it seems such a little thing, so easy to slip on, or slip off. It’s difficult to believe that it has any value. And as one approaches the most critical of choices, its weight grows heavier, and each step along the path is quite treacherous. How much easier it is to simply put the burden down, rather than carrying it each step to the end.

†

Thanks for your responses to me. I look forward to reading more of your thoughts. Take good care of yourself.

As for reducing congressional pay: their salary is already a tiny part of what these guys line their nests with, and reducing it will only make them more eager to develop other income streams. I’d be happy to pay them more but term-limit them so they don’t stay as long. The current crop of crooks, ideologues, con artists, and traitors would still be a bad deal for us at half the price.

Doctor Zero on April 23, 2009 at 10:09 AM

A very good point. You get what you pay for.
Term limits at this point seem the only way to curb the corruption.

Come to think of it, now’s not the time. 90 years from now. When im old enough to have great grandkids, and everyone alive is totally adjusted to high technology. I wonder what kind of government we’d come up with.

ernesto on April 22, 2009 at 11:15 PM

Boy that’s pretty selfish. Let’s just let them deal with it bcs we don’t want to.
All this ‘fear’ of a Const. Convention everybody is whining about blows my mind.
Obviously voting doesn’t work anymore bcs of how districts have been organized & voter fraud & disillusionment among the voting public & among the eligible, but non-voting public.
I’m just curious how many people want to remain timid about all of this & how much more power are they going to let the Fed grab?
A convention is risky. So what? You’ll never get anywhere without taking some risk & I’m thinking it’s long overdue for us to do something constructive about the Fed’s power.
I run into the wimpy scared attitude all the time at work.
Nothing changes bcs everybody’s scared. So there’s a meeting, a little negotiation, & then everybody chickens out & nothing gets accomplished.
I don’t mind taking a risk.Bcs in the end, we risk bloody revolution if we stay on the same path.

MarkTheGreat on April 23, 2009 at 9:34 AM

Your prayers have been answered, genius!

Money as Debt

A Constitutional Convention would see every Leftist, Socialist and other fellow travelers ooze out of the muck in which they live. The resultant document would make War and Peace look like a simple easy read (ever see the European Constitution?)

I’d settle for the following:

1. Repeal the 16th Amendment – Income Tax
2. Repeal the 17th Amendment – direct election of Senators

When 435 incompetent, power hungry, egomaniacs ‘represent’ 300 MILLION+ Americans, there’s a problem. The House of Representatives Ill-Repute is not truly representative of the people. Thus:

3. Approval of an Amendment to limit Congressional Districts to the Federalist concept of 100,000 American citizens – increase the count in the House of Representatives and lessen the power of any one Representative while making them more accountable to their constituents.
4. Approval of an Amendment to make Congressional salaries representative of their constituents yearly income – in other words cut their pay.

The ’several States’ are at the mercy of a bloated, over powering, stupid behemoth of a Federal Government whose ‘brain’ (i.e. Congress) is too small to control its own actions.

SeniorD on April 23, 2009 at 9:06 AM

I have a hard time imagining any scenario in which the 17th Amendment is repealed – you would face a horde of people from every corner of the political spectrum, howling about “disenfrachisement.” By the time we have an electorate mature and politically discerning enough to support something so easy to demagogue, we would have much less urgent need of such a reform.

The 16th Amendment is going to be a tough one, too. It exists because of a crisis of faith toward capitalism – the belief that a completely free economy is too lavish to its winners, and too harsh on its losers. I don’t see how anything close to a majority of voters could be persuaded to part with that belief. One of the reasons I prefer the flat tax to the Fair Tax, as an idea for radical tax reform, is that the Fair Tax will never work unless the 16th Amendment is repealed – otherwise the “Fair Tax” would swiftly become a value-added-tax lumped on top of income tax, which would quickly return to confiscatory levels. The flat tax would be an epic uphill battle, but repealing the amendment that allows taxation of income would be an uphill battle with the electorate marching backward, every stop of the way. At least the total collapse of socialism Obama is presiding over should make the electorate willing to march uphill for the first time in generations.

Limiting the size of congressional districts is a good idea in theory, and I’m all in favor of diluting the power of individual politicians, but it would be a tough sell to minority communities that would see the power of their racially-elected champions watered down. It’s painful to say it, but the American minority voters are the most culturally and politically childish electoral body on Earth, and they are generations away from reaching the point where they don’t see their political leadership as their only ticket to livelihood, respect, and fair treatment… they’re too close to solid historical reasons for feeling that way. I tend to think restraining the collectivist tendencies of Congress, with legal barriers they can’t bend or break, is more important than changing the number of elected representatives. Term-limiting them, in both House and Senate, would seem like a much more effective way to prevent the development of corrupt feudal barons like Barney Frank, who already comes from a very small voting district. In fact, reducing the size of the districts without imposing term limits would make it even more likely we’d be saddled with Representatives-For-Life, and even if you double the number of congressmen, you’re still going to have powerful committee chairs for them to fuse their butts into.

As for reducing congressional pay: their salary is already a tiny part of what these guys line their nests with, and reducing it will only make them more eager to develop other income streams. I’d be happy to pay them more but term-limit them so they don’t stay as long. The current crop of crooks, ideologues, con artists, and traitors would still be a bad deal for us at half the price.

May I remind you that by one post-election report Obama was able to ‘dummy up’ about 10 million votes via fraud [admittedly that only one report...]. And he has a pre-assembled ‘activist/voter’ database-network.

Before I leap off this cliff, I WANT to see the ground rules of WHO gets credentialed to attend this convention, AND the ground rules for convention set in concrete…no ‘last-minute, out-of-blue’ mods.

Without those parameters, here’s what I foresee…

a] a high-jacked convention with ‘god-knows-what’ results…

b] a ‘record-time’ ratification of those changes via a combo of pressure from [obot flash-mob] ‘popular-support’, MSM drumming, and promises of money [taxpayer or otherwise...] to as many state legislators as necessary to ‘seal the deal’.

Am I painting a worse-case scenario…you betcha. Why?

The ’08 election.

fractional, fiat currency, for-profit money lending,
TMK on April 23, 2009 at 5:55 AM

God save us from the well meaing but utterly ignorant.

I’d settle for the following:

1. Repeal the 16th Amendment – Income Tax
2. Repeal the 17th Amendment – direct election of Senators

When 435 incompetent, power hungry, egomaniacs ‘represent’ 300 MILLION+ Americans, there’s a problem. The House of Representatives Ill-Repute is not truly representative of the people. Thus:

3. Approval of an Amendment to limit Congressional Districts to the Federalist concept of 100,000 American citizens – increase the count in the House of Representatives and lessen the power of any one Representative while making them more accountable to their constituents.
4. Approval of an Amendment to make Congressional salaries representative of their constituents yearly income – in other words cut their pay.

The ‘several States’ are at the mercy of a bloated, over powering, stupid behemoth of a Federal Government whose ‘brain’ (i.e. Congress) is too small to control its own actions.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic

venividivici on April 23, 2009 at 8:11 AM

Tks. for that link. It’s a very interesting article, and the first somewhat hopeful thing I’ve read about our current predicament.

Workin’ on the aim — ass loads of Ammo

So when the Zombie revolution comes to pass, I’ll be takin all headshots

blatantblue on April 23, 2009 at 7:16 AM

O/T – have you fellow reloaders seen “Are you licensed to reload that ammo? Alarm raised over treaty provision to ban activity”

I like to think it’s not so much a question of producing them as awakening them – not in the annoying “awareness raising,” hectoring style of the Left, but by offering them a critique of the decaying system that surrounds them. It must be a case made with both reason and passion, and unfortunately, after a few opportunities were lost over the last forty years, it’s a case that can only be made when the downward spiral of socialism enters its terminal phase.

Doctor Zero on April 23, 2009 at 1:49 AM

Instapundit linked to a good essay on the coming decline of “The Special Interest State” and the emergence of a fourth American Republic. Definitely worth reading.

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/april-2009/the-coming-of-the-fourth-american-republic

We are in a crisis of legitimacy. The concept of legitimacy, the right to rule, is the single most important factor in political life. The particulars of how it is gained and lost are infinitely varied, according to the culture and history of the polity. In Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” Dennis says to King Arthur: “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” But indeed the Lady of the Lake can be sufficient, if that is what enough people think, and a proponent of the Divine Right of Kings would regard committing the decision to the votes of the people as ludicrous.

In the United States, legitimacy is conferred by elections, but it is not total. Through the ages, the basic question mark about democracy as a form of government has been that 51 percent of the electorate can band together to oppress the minority—“the tyranny of the majority” is a valid concern. To address it, the United States has a formal written Constitution to guarantee basic rights, but it also has an unwritten constitution that sets limits on how far the winners can push their victories. Exceed the amorphous bounds, and not only does the minority no longer accept the legitimacy of the government, many members of the majority coalition will have a guilty conscience as well, knowing that their acquiescence to the demands of one of their allies was a bad deed. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”

I think he hits on a key point. I have zero respect for the left’s legitimacy as a ruling faction. Zero. I’m sure they think the same. This is not a sustainable situation.

Under a dictatorship it’s best to keep some thoughts to yourself

Workin’ on the aim — ass loads of Ammo

So when the Zombie revolution comes to pass, I’ll be takin all headshots

blatantblue on April 23, 2009 at 7:16 AM

But the king of all shots is the “nutt shot!”

So many laws have been broken, ignored, or argued around in the most transparently asinine twists of logic, by our government, that I fear all faith in the institutions is just about irreplenishible, at this point. We’ll see this play out with the dollar.

All I can say now is, I hope all you boobs have good aim and lots of ammo.

Spiritk9 on April 23, 2009 at 4:44 AM

Workin’ on the aim — ass loads of Ammo

So when the Zombie revolution comes to pass, I’ll be takin all headshots

One or both? I mean, at the moment, my husband and I rent…but we WILL own…and we DEFINITELY pay taxes. I know a lot of responsible people who are renters for a season. eh.
Mommypundit on April 23, 2009 at 6:37 AM

I would be willing to do either or both. I was a renter, as well, and certainly a responsible voter who wouldn’t have dreamed of taking something I hadn’t earned. You and your husband would have been able to buy property much more easily if more than a quarter of your earnings were not confiscated by the government.

Hate to be a downer, but the Federal Income tax by way of the 16th amendment is actually Constitutional.

Daemonocracy on April 22, 2009 at 11:42 PM

I agree with Boortz. The 16th amendment needs to be repealed.

Until every American learns that spending money not earned is immoral theft, and until every servant of the People is accountable and easily punished for lawbreaking and waste, the former-republic will remain in a terminal condition.

TMK on April 23, 2009 at 5:55 AM

I agree. I’m raising my kids this way…if we, and our friends, and hopefully family and maybe even neighbors can be educated in this, we might get somewhere.

Have you ever hung out with homeschoolers? Those are your patriots.

We also need to get rid of universal suffrage, and have paying taxes owning property as basic voting requirements.

DrMagnolias on April 23, 2009 at 5:00 AM

One or both? I mean, at the moment, my husband and I rent…but we WILL own…and we DEFINITELY pay taxes. I know a lot of responsible people who are renters for a season. eh.

About voting: I wish that the fed would enact SOMETHING that was universally fair and tamper proof…like the issuing of drivers license-type voting cards. You don’t have a card? You can’t vote. PERIOD. 1 person, 1 card, 1 state, 1 address. And purple ink the finger, too.

Plus, I live in California. So, increased states rights is not necessarily a good thing…

The Constitution itself is the defense against the behavior we’ve seen for 100 years. What we need to do is repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments, which did great damage to the system our founders set up. We also need to get rid of universal suffrage, and have paying taxes owning property as basic voting requirements.

DrMagnolias on April 23, 2009 at 5:00 AM

Those are all good ideas, but not until the U.S. rids itself of unelected bureaucrats, fractional, fiat currency, for-profit money lending, and socialized everything, will anything positive ever happen.

Until every American learns that spending money not earned is immoral theft, and until every servant of the People is accountable and easily punished for lawbreaking and waste, the former-republic will remain in a terminal condition.

The Constitution itself is the defense against the behavior we’ve seen for 100 years. What we need to do is repeal the 16th and 17th Amendments, which did great damage to the system our founders set up. We also need to get rid of universal suffrage, and have paying taxes owning property as basic voting requirements.

To repair any of the damage that has already been done to our brilliantly designed system, we need a nation of people who have at least a basic understanding of that system, and there are too many people who can’t be bothered to even read the Constitution to get that (feeling curmudgeonly today).