Sundering the Union + Constitution in "Crisis" + Convention of States(Article V)

Karlysymon

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When the country of Sudan was broken into two, John Kerry was widely reported as having said that the USA midwifed the birth of the new (South Sudan) nation. I trust that he and the rest of the Biden team will re-employ those skills and play midwife when the birthing pangs hit the Union as he & Co. ram through the Great Reset Agenda.

Discussion on the fallout, ramifications, links to secession/separatism are welcome as well as predictive programming in the form of those conspicuous maps that pop up in movies and tv shows.
 
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Karlysymon

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DesertRose originally posted this 2019 article in another thread and the Xbox video.

 

Aero

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I never played "Shattered Union," but it sounds pretty wild from that clip.

The Republic of Texas is way too out there, even for me. Especially given Texas is under a state of emergency right now over the type of snow everyone else deals with fine. Now maybe they can spin it as some reason to succeed, but right now, Texas looks weak as hell.

People are dying, and politicians in Texas are just like, eh, whatever. Freezing to death and carbon monoxide poisoning aren't horrible ways to die. Not a big deal when it happens to your constituents. The apathy on display is galling, and that's putting it lightly.
 

Karlysymon

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An article published on Wednesday in The Nation presents a thorough case for a “blue-state secession,” claiming it is “the only way to ensure democracy and equal justice” for all citizens.

The essay, penned by writer and CUNY Professor Nathan Newman and titled “The Case for Blue-State Secession,” claims that despite “demands for secession by red-state leaders and conservative commentators” it is actually blue states that possess “the real case” for secession.

Newman explains that American politics “systematically tilts money and power to smaller and more conservative states” which undermines “the interests of the majority of the population.”

He adds that “[o]ur current constitutional arrangements are not just undemocratic; they starve blue states financially, deny human rights to their residents, and repeatedly undermine local policy innovation,” before referencing GOP candidates who “took the presidency,” or came close to doing so, despite losing the popular vote; and a Senate controlled by “a minority of the population” filling the Supreme Court “with a supermajority of Republican justices.”

“Given the undemocratic power of the Senate to entrench its own minority rule, the threat of secession is the only viable route to restoring democracy and equal justice, not just for blue-state residents but for Americans in all 50 states who are hurt by our undemocratic political system,” he writes.

Referring to the COVID-19 pandemic, Newman claims that it has:

…transformed an ongoing political irritant into a murderous political indifference that we can no longer ignore,” before noting that a “disparity in Covid relief reflects the broader reality that many blue states send far more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back in public services or other government funding.
Claiming the current political system “converts right-wing bias in political power into economic transfers that undermine blue states,” Newman writes that it is “not accidental.”

Lately, there has been so much frustration with the last election and the direction of our country that some Trump supporters have been talking about “secession.” Many conservatives and libertarians are asking if it makes sense for certain states to leave the union the way South Carolina left in 1860, after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States.


Whether it makes “sense” or not, we can be assured that it will not happen. Although the South Carolina state legislature voted in November of 1860 to initiate the process of secession, no state legislature would do that today. This is because most modern state legislatures, even conservative ones, do not have many members who are angry enough at the federal government to support seceding from it.

Never forget that many individual state legislators are professional politicians. They may disagree with some of the policies that flow from Washington D.C., but they are not angry enough to vote for secession, and that is what is required to secede, anger. While an official secession will not happen, there will be a different type. In fact, it has already started in our country.

Instead of state legislatures, dominated by urban dwellers, voting for secession, Americans who live in rural and some suburban areas are executing a secession of their own. They are disassociating themselves from the lifestyles, cultural mores, laws, and self-inflicted wounds exhibited in our large cities.
 

Karlysymon

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It is very possible that some of these movements may not be entirely genuine in their motives to secede, especially on the "local" level, because TPTB envision an America broken up into mega regions by 2050. Rosa Koire was asked about it here (start at the 5min mark)

2013 Rockefeller Paper Predicted Isolation & No Physical Contact

In relation to the power of nation-states, the paper argues that states power may diminish more, giving rise to megacities, local identity politics, and global networks:

"The power of states and their ability to provide an effective nexus between the local and global levels may diminish in the face of growing megacities, local identity politics, increasing social exclusion, increasing private influence on all spheres of life, widening liberalisation and stronger global networks" (p.10).
 
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Karlysymon

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In the video above of Spiro and Rosa Koire, she brought up this subject of the convention of states (at the 13:40min mark) when he asked her that inorder for "this agenda (21) to succeed, America and/or its constitution would have to be severely altered". So it seems to me that the covid agenda was designed precisely to lead to this outcome.

Nebraska state Sen. Steve Halloran, a Republican who sponsored the resolution, told Fox News that he believes an “overreach on the part of the federal government” is driving states to push for change.

The Founding Fathers had anxiety that that might happen,” Halloran said. “I don’t believe they imagined that it would get to this point.

Halloran decried the $30 trillion national debt as “unsustainable.”

“It’s become abundantly clear with the history of Congress that they have no sense of limiting their spending and the accrued debt that’s happening upon our nation,” Halloran said.

“We have effectively kicked that can down the road on repayment of any of that, but we cannot kick the can down the road every year,” he added.

The senator called on other states to join on calls to amend the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s an exercise in what the Constitution is,” he said. “I think it would be a great civics lesson once it happens.

In a message aimed at state leaders, Halloran told Fox News he believes the nation can no longer be operated on “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

He separately told Newsweek that states need to move to exercise their constitutional authority by “proposing amendments through an Article V Convention of States to restrain the federal government from driving our country into insolvency.”

According to the Convention of States Action, so far Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Utah have approved a call for the convention, while 24 others are considering doing so.
 
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I just noticed this on the first post with the picture of the economist magazine cover. At the top of it there is a listing for an article called "The Caucasian Catastrophe". Does anyone know what that is about?
 

Karlysymon

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TempestOfTempo

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In the video above of Spiro and Rosa Koire, she brought up this subject of the convention of states (at the 13:40min mark) when he asked her that inorder for "this agenda (21) to succeed, America and/or its constitution would have to be severely altered". So it seems to me that the covid agenda was designed precisely to lead to this outcome.

Nebraska state Sen. Steve Halloran, a Republican who sponsored the resolution, told Fox News that he believes an “overreach on the part of the federal government” is driving states to push for change.

The Founding Fathers had anxiety that that might happen,” Halloran said. “I don’t believe they imagined that it would get to this point.

Halloran decried the $30 trillion national debt as “unsustainable.”

“It’s become abundantly clear with the history of Congress that they have no sense of limiting their spending and the accrued debt that’s happening upon our nation,” Halloran said.

“We have effectively kicked that can down the road on repayment of any of that, but we cannot kick the can down the road every year,” he added.

The senator called on other states to join on calls to amend the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s an exercise in what the Constitution is,” he said. “I think it would be a great civics lesson once it happens.

In a message aimed at state leaders, Halloran told Fox News he believes the nation can no longer be operated on “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

He separately told Newsweek that states need to move to exercise their constitutional authority by “proposing amendments through an Article V Convention of States to restrain the federal government from driving our country into insolvency.”

According to the Convention of States Action, so far Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arizona, North Dakota, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Utah have approved a call for the convention, while 24 others are considering doing so.
Nebraska had one of the staunchest resistances to the covid mandates... now the local PTB are trying to rally public support for more draconian measures and the people aint having it. People are just ignoring them, even those supposed to enforce them. Some cops still use them as a bludgeon/excuse to violate people but outside of their violence-imposed authority, not many are going to disbelieve their lying eyes and accept these draconian measures.
 

PeninsulaDweller

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I just noticed this on the first post with the picture of the economist magazine cover. At the top of it there is a listing for an article called "The Caucasian Catastrophe". Does anyone know what that is about?
It is about how Armenians and Azeris are killing each other, how Russia deals with Georgia and how some of the Caucasian republics that fall within Russian borders are even more backwards than the country they belong to. I know first-hand as my gf is from North Ossetia-Alania, Russia, in the Caucasus, and it's not rare there for someone to kidnap a woman and by doing so she becomes his wife. That's like something the Romans did more than 2000 years ago.

So, no, by Caucasian disaster they are not using the word Caucasian to mean "white person".
 
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It is about how Armenians and Azeris are killing each other, how Russia deals with Georgia and how some of the Caucasian republics that fall within Russian borders are even more backwards than the country they belong to. I know first-hand as my gf is from North Ossetia-Alania, Russia, in the Caucasus, and it's not rare there for someone to kidnap a woman and by doing so she becomes his wife. That's like something the Romans did more than 2000 years ago.

So, no, by Caucasian disaster they are not using the word Caucasian to mean "white person".
Thanks for clearing that up. I thought it meant more planned bad news for white people and our plates are already overflowing with potential danger.
 

Karlysymon

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2019
"In the next few years, many Americans understand, the Supreme Court may provide answers to some of the most hotly contested questions of constitutional law—the scope of affirmative action and federal power, for example, or the future of Roe v. Wade. What fewer recognize is that if the balance of the current Court changes, the settlement of these questions will not be part of the ordinary stream of decisions, but will instead represent the culmination of a more fundamental battle over the Constitution that has been waged since the New Deal era, one whose outcome could define American government and politics for many decades to come.

This is not the first battle over the Constitution in American history, but the fourth. All four battles have concerned the nature and scope of federal power in balancing the values declared to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality, and popular sovereignty. In this sense, the fourth battle echoes the three earlier battles and encapsulates the unique status of the Constitution in American life as the one document that both divides and unites us.


In response to this crucial moment in the history of the Constitution and the United States, the National Constitution Center and The Atlantic are launching a new project, The Battle for the Constitution. Our goal is to convene the leading constitutional scholars in America—progressive, conservative, libertarian, or idiosyncratic—to write about the constitutional debates at the center of American life.
Throughout the project, readers can also learn from the National Constitution Center’s Interactive Constitution and We the People podcasts, which bring together leading liberal and conservative scholars to explore every clause of the Constitution. The stakes of this battle are enormous, and we hope that the essays in this nonpartisan project will provide readers with the context, analysis, and perspective needed to make sense of it all. There is no better way to begin, perhaps, than reviewing the stakes of the previous battles."
 

Karlysymon

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2017

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“The idea has support that extends well beyond those fixated on fiscal probity. Although the most successful Article V campaigners have been conservatives, some on the left like the idea, too. They think the status quo is defective, that constitutional fixes need to be applied and that a convention ostensibly called for the purposes of a balanced-budget amendment might, once in session, be convinced to widen its ambit and consider other amendments too. This prospect—a “runaway” convention—persuades others that Article V is a Pandora’s Box which needs to be kept firmly shut. It may not be much longer before it becomes clear which side is right.

…..Virginia’s House of Delegates approved an Article V application in 2016, but Richard Black, a Republican state senator, has helped stymie the resolution’s progress with warnings of devious Democrats hijacking a convention. “They could change freedom of religion to say certain teachings from the Bible are hate speech,” he told supporters by e-mail in 2015. “They could take away our right to own a gun.” And there are indeed people on the left who like the idea of turning such a convention to their own ends. Two Republican majorities in Congress alongside a Republican president have made the idea of restraining the federal government more appealing to liberals. An Article V convention has a prominent advocate in Lawrence Lessig, an idealistic law professor at Harvard, who argues that it is the only way to achieve campaign- finance reform. Mr Lessig envisions a grand bargain of “electoral integrity for fiscal integrity”, in which the left would reduce the amount of money in elections and the right would reduce the amount spent by government.

To allay the fears that Mr Black and Mr Lessig might stir in Republican hearts, the BBATF and CoS insist that a convention could put forward amendments only on the subjects listed in the states’ applications. Sponsors in some states, such as Wisconsin, have proposed state laws that would ban delegates from casting votes on unrelated topics. But Article V itself says nothing about limiting the scope of a convention. Indeed, it says nothing about many issues which, were a convention to be called under its auspices, would become contested: who would attend; whether it would be open to states that had not called for it; what limits might be placed on its delegates; by what majority an amendment would need to pass to be proposed; and so on.

The convention’s freedom applies only to proposing amendments. Those changes still need to be ratified by 38 states—which proponents of a convention say offers a crucial check on anyone doing anything they do not approve of. Mr Lessig dismisses CoS’s wish list of amendments as “a certain loser” at the ratification stage. Mr Meckler says Mr Lessig is “fantasising” about a campaign-finance amendment: “Political reality makes [it] unviable.”

But the logic of a convention might argue against such purity. The delegates, expecting the support of the solidly Republican state legislatures that had called the convention, would know they needed some split legislatures for ratification. Would they really be above crafting their amendment so as to contain something enticing to the other side?"
 

Karlysymon

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2012

"As the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

…..Our obsession with the Constitution has saddled us with a dysfunctional political system, kept us from debating the merits of divisive issues and inflamed our public discourse. Instead of arguing about what is to be done, we argue about what James Madison might have wanted done 225 years ago.


…..The deep-seated fear that such [Constitutional] disobedience would unravel our social fabric is mere superstition. As we have seen, the country has successfully survived numerous examples of constitutional infidelity. And as we see now, the failure of the Congress and the White House to agree has already destabilized the country. Countries like Britain and New Zealand have systems of parliamentary supremacy and no written constitution, but are held together by longstanding traditions, accepted modes of procedure and engaged citizens. We, too, could draw on these resources.

What has preserved our political stability is not a poetic piece of parchment, but entrenched institutions and habits of thought and, most important, the sense that we are one nation and must work out our differences. No one can predict in detail what our system of government would look like if we freed ourselves from the shackles of constitutional obligation, and I harbor no illusions that any of this will happen soon. But even if we can’t kick our constitutional-law addiction, we can soften the habit.

If we acknowledged what should be obvious — that much constitutional language is broad enough to encompass an almost infinitely wide range of positions — we might have a very different attitude about the obligation to obey. It would become apparent that people who disagree with us about the Constitution are not violating a sacred text or our core commitments. Instead, we are all invoking a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace. Of course, that does not mean that people agree at the ground level. If we are not to abandon constitutionalism entirely, then we might at least understand it as a place for discussion, a demand that we make a good-faith effort to understand the views of others, rather than as a tool to force others to give up their moral and political judgments.

If even this change is impossible, perhaps the dream of a country ruled by “We the people” is impossibly utopian. If so, we have to give up on the claim that we are a self-governing people who can settle our disagreements through mature and tolerant debate. But before abandoning our heritage of self-government, we ought to try extricating ourselves from constitutional bondage so that we can give real freedom a chance."
 

Karlysymon

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2011

"NOW we're talking! In a penetrating essay that asks "Are America's best days behind us?" and bravely answers "Maybe", Fareed Zakaria gets one huge thing right. The problem is not, as your favourite major political party would have you believe, the other major political party. The problem is America's antiquated infrastructure. Not our planes, trains and automobiles infrastructure, but our decrepit, sclerotic institutional infrastructure. The problem is...are you ready for it?...the constitution! Don't be gentle, Mr Zakaria:

At the very moment that our political system has broken down, one hears only encomiums to it, the Constitution and the perfect Republic that it created. Now, as an immigrant, I love the special and, yes, exceptional nature of American democracy. I believe that the Constitution was one of the wonders of the world — in the 18th century. But today we face the reality of a system that has become creaky. We have an Electoral College that no one understands and a Senate that doesn't work, with rules and traditions that allow a single Senator to obstruct democracy without even explaining why. We have a crazy-quilt patchwork of towns, municipalities and states with overlapping authority, bureaucracies and resulting waste. We have a political system geared toward ceaseless fundraising and pandering to the interests of the present with no ability to plan, invest or build for the future. And if one mentions any of this, why, one is being unpatriotic, because we have the perfect system of government, handed down to us by demigods who walked the earth in the late 18th century and who serve as models for us today and forever.

America's founders would have been profoundly annoyed by this kind of unreflective ancestor worship.


Let's take a moment to enjoy that last line. You people should be ashamed of your founder-worship because the founders would have hated it! So let's make our founders, who art in heaven, proud. Let's radically revise the constitution! Perhaps it's too much to say that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants, but an occasionally refreshed bed of absorbent constitutional mulch might help.

A few years ago, I would have blanched at the suggestion to remodel the constitution. But then I had the good fortune to meet Sanford Levinson, a professor of law at the University of Texas. In his book, "Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It)", Mr Levinson proposes a national referendum on the question of whether to call a new constitutional convention. He convinced me that a new constitutional convention wouldn't lead to the constitutionalisation of a prohibition on gay marriage, or anything substantive like that. The only provisions likely to win a sufficient level of popular support, Mr Levinson argued, are procedural amendments that would alter the structure of governance in evidently sensible ways. To motivate the reader to see the merits of a new convention, Mr Levinson asks these questions:...."
 

Karlysymon

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^^^Just in time

"A constitutional amendment proposal supporting or limiting abortion rights would, like any amendment, require a two-thirds vote of both the US House and US Senate — a much greater threshold than Congress passing a law, which Democrats are also expected to try in an all-but-futile attempt to codify Roe v. Wade for the long term.

If such a constitution amendment proposal somehow passed, three-fourths of state legislatures must then ratify it for the amendment to become law.

From the 1970s through the early 2000s, abortion rights opponents — overwhelmingly Republicans — tried this route. They proposed a series of materially similar constitutional amendment proposals, which all sought to overturn Roe v. Wade. Often dubbed the "Human Life Amendment," none came close to passage out of either the House or Senate.

Alternately, two-thirds of US states could request the nation conduct a constitutional convention — sometimes known as an Article V convention — for the purpose of amending the Constitution. Three-fourths of states would again have to ratify any amendments the convention proposed. There are also fundamental questions about how a constitutional convention might even work, with the Congressional Research Service noting numerous unanswered questions.


Such a convention has never occurred in US history.

The likelihood of one occurring for the purposes of creating a constitutional right to abortion seems as remote today as ever, particularly given that Republicans control a notable majority of state legislative bodies, according to the latest count by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Despite the odds, some Democrats almost certainly will advocate making the right to an abortion the Constitution's 28th amendment.
"
 

Karlysymon

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2019

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Constitution in Crisis
Has America’s founding document become the nation’s undoing?
by
Donna Edwards, Mary Anne Franks, David Law, Lawrence Lessig, Louis Michael Seidman

"America’s Constitution was once celebrated as a radical and successful blueprint for democratic governance, a model for fledgling republics across the world. But decades of political gridlock, electoral corruption, and dysfunction in our system of government have forced scholars, activists, and citizens to question the document’s ability to address the thorniest issues of modern political life.

Does the path out of our current era of stalemate, minority rule, and executive abuse require amending the Constitution? Do we need a new constitutional convention to rewrite the document and update it for the twenty-first century? Should we abolish it entirely?

This spring, Harper’s Magazine invited five lawmakers and scholars to New York University’s law school to consider the constitutional crisis of the twenty-first century. The event was moderated by Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown and the author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon.
.....................
Rosa Brooks: Let me tell a story about what I do in my constitutional law classes at Georgetown. In the very first session, I say to my students, “The United States has the oldest continually operative written constitution in the world. How do you feel about that?”

And everybody goes into a “rah-rah, Constitution” mode. The U.S.-born students look smug, and the non-U.S.-born students look puzzled. After everybody has a chance to talk about how great it is that the United States has this very, very old written constitution, I ask them how they would feel if their neurosurgeon used the world’s oldest neurosurgery guide, or if NASA used the world’s oldest astronomical chart to plan space-shuttle flights, and they all get quiet.


So I thought I would ask you all to talk about one of the many oddities of American constitutional history. The United States was born of violent revolution, and it was born of a group of people coming to believe that the form of government they were living under was illegitimate, and that they had the right to say, “We don’t like that government anymore.” They came up with an alternative form of government, which was revised still further at the Constitutional Convention, giving us the document we have today.

How did it happen that the United States, which was born in a moment of bloody revolution out of a conviction that every generation had the right to change its form of government, developed a culture that so many years later is weirdly hidebound when it comes to its form of government, reveres this piece of paper as if it had been handed by God out of a burning bush, and treats the Constitution as more or less sacred? Is it really such a good thing to have a document written almost 250 years ago still be viewed as binding us in some way?

..................
LESSIG: I think what we have to focus on in a very precise way is: What are the steps that could get us to a place that could make the democracy a responsive democracy? How do we break this deeply unrepresentative system that we have right now?

The U.S. Constitution has the provision in Article V to allow us to call a convention to propose amendments. If two-thirds of the state legislatures vote to convene it, the Constitution requires it. That’s what we need to do.

EDWARDS: I’m a little leery about opening up the whole show in a constitutional convention, but I think it’s worth thinking through how something like that might be done in a way that doesn’t allow for monkey business, especially from conservatives.

I don’t think the current political process really positions us to work through these constitutional challenges.

SEIDMAN: I don’t think we need another constitutional convention. You know what would happen? The country would come apart at the seams. And the reason it would come apart at the seams is because if we really confronted the things that divide us, and really were honest about them, there would be no reconciliation.

To start with, there would be a huge fight about whether the United States is a Christian country. And if we confronted that, God knows what would happen. It’s a little like a marriage—there are perfectly successful marriages that go on for years and years in which the spouses are happy, and the reason they’re happy is precisely because they never actually sit down and have a deep conversation about what the purpose of the marriage is.


LESSIG: I don’t think people are happy. We’re not talking about happy people. We’re talking about people who are not happy. That’s the point. We’re starting at a place where it’s not working.

SEIDMAN: But they’d be less happy. What keeps the United States together in the end is not some deep agreement about the philosophical issues that would surface if we really tried to rewrite the Constitution.

What keeps the country together—to the extent it is still together—is a much looser sense that we’re all in this together, that we sink or swim together, and some very loose ideas about tolerance and equality. If you try to put that into a legal text, things are going to come apart at the seams.

LESSIG: But, Mike, this is a false dichotomy. You’re saying we couldn’t possibly have a convention that would rewrite the whole of the Constitution and our foundations as a country. I agree with that. Of course we can’t.

What I’m talking about is the fact that we have a constitution right now that creates a deeply corrupted process for selecting our representatives and our president, and we have no way to fix that, given the current way that the Constitution itself gets amended.

So this is not about agreeing on fundamental values; it’s about the smaller point of, “How do we get to a democracy that people actually feel represents them?” And that will only happen if we have some fundamental changes to the constitutional order, which we won’t get unless we figure out a way to amend the Constitution."
 
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