We Are Now One State Closer to Having a Corporate-Dominated Constitutional Convention

With the addition of Wisconsin, right-wingers promoting a Constitutional Convention have 28 states; they only need six more.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 9, 2017, 1:28 PM GMT

While Democrats on Wednesday were feeling encouraged and empowered by Tuesday’s coast-to-coast rejection of Trumpism, Republican legislators who control Wisconsin did what the GOP does best in elections: voted to rig the system to favor their agenda. Only this time the target wasn’t voter suppression; it was the U.S. Constitution.

On Tuesday, the Wisconsin Legislature voted to call for what’s known as an Article V constitutional convention, becoming the 28th state to do so in recent years. Thirty-four states are needed, according to the nation’s founding document, to launch a process that would open up the foundation of American’s rights and laws to revision.

“Sadly, this is not fake news,” said Common Cause president Karen Hobert Flynn. “The specter of an Article V convention to rewrite the Constitution remains one of the most alarming threats to our democracy that nobody has ever heard of before.”

“The deep-pocketed special interest groups behind this effort to call a convention are not likely to stop with a single amendment when there are no rules to prevent opening up the Constitution to a full rewrite in a runaway convention,” Flynn explained. “The effort to call the convention is funded by wealthy special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council that have long pushed for a broad legislative agenda in the states, and it is hard to imagine then not foisting that agenda on the Constitution itself through unelected and unaccountable delegates to the convention.”

Revising the U.S. Constitution is not the only big idea that has surfaced following 2017’s Election Day. On Wednesday morning, the New York Times endorsed the national popular vote compact, where states agree to award all of their Electoral College votes for the next president to whoever wins the national popular vote. (In 2016, that was Hillary Clinton, by nearly 3 million votes. So far, 10 states and the District of Columbia have signed on, pledging 165 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed.)

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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/wisconsin-latest-red-run-state-call-rewriting-constitution