Texas Governor Greg Abbott Really Wants To Rewrite The Constitution
I hate to bring this topic up again, but Republican governors’ in this country are determined to undermine the federal government and hand power to the states. They don’t say it like that. They couch it in language that any rube will accept. “We want power back in the hands of the local people,” or “Washington has overstepped its bounds and violated the Constitution!”
After all, the people are supposed to have the power according to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. However, if you believe these lying governors when they make these disingenuous calls, you misunderstand their intent completely. That is exactly what they want, though.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has joined other Republican blowhards in calling for a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the Constitution of the United States. He has even proposed nine new amendments that he believes must be added. It is very hard to get forty states to agree to such a convention, but if they do, the entire document is up for revision. With the states heavily controlled by Republicans, you can bet they will destroy a lot of the protections that are guaranteed therein, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
I am not going to list out all of Governor Abbott’s nine amendments because a few of them all boil down to states being able to nullify anything the federal government and Supreme Court do. This flies directly in the face of the purpose of the Constitution in the first place, which was to provide a stronger federal government to bring the states together and keep them in line so that they wouldn’t just go off on their own and write their own crazy laws. All states agreed when they joined the Union to be bound by this document and its laws. They also agreed that their laws would conform to federal laws, especially after the Civil War.
There are other amendments suggested that are just outright stupid, but are such a part of the Republican mantra that they have to be thrown in. For instance, he calls for a balanced budget amendment. Why is that bad? Well, when a country hits a massive recession or depression, money becomes very tight, and those who have it often refuse to spend it, and the economy worsens. This causes the situation to worsen. One of the best way to counter this is for the government to run a deficit at this time and provide the populace with more jobs and other incentives to help spur the economy.
Americans may have hated the big bank bailouts or those given to GM and Chrysler but had those industries crashed hundreds of thousands of more people would have been out of work. The economy would have taken a massive hit with the loss of so many banks, along with our country and so many others around the world. Even though these actions by the government are distasteful, they are sometimes absolutely necessary.
However, let me get back to the idea of a new Constitutional Convention. So many Republicans who are not politicians think this a great idea without realizing just how much they stand to lose after it is all said and done. Certainly federal control will be severely limited. That means that states will have primacy, and will begin writing all sorts of new laws to conform to their new Constitution.
But, what rights will you have in this new document? You can say goodbye to a lot of them. The ninth is certainly gone, because you will only have the rights enumerated by the new Constitution. The first will likely be rewritten to give more rights to Christians and less or none to others. Free speech and assembly will be severely curtailed, because they won’t want anyone complaining about what they’ve done.
They hate the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments so strike them from the rolls. In our modern day, the fourth amendment has no real relevance since we have to protect ourselves from terrorists and treasonous people. The police need tools to combat these individuals. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.
Be aware that a call for a new Constitutional Convention will completely change the nature of this country. Those Republicans who are calling for it already want to dismantle much of our society and rebuild it in their own image. You cannot go forward by going backward, and rewriting the Constitution to hand power to the states like the Articles of Confederation is a long step backward.
