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H4xOr WaNgEr Game profile

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Nov 7th 2012, 19:47:50

Originally posted by Angel1:
Originally posted by ZIP:
bad idea - i don't have the time to go into it right now - just bad idea.

I'm willing to listen to the reasons why you think this is a bad idea, but I already know that this is an extreme action. There is a reason why the Constitutional Convention has NEVER been used before. We could quite literally risk the dissolution of the Union. That being said, I think that nothing short of a convention or at least the significant risk thereof can snap the federal government back to its intended and limited role in lives of ordinary Americans. I see the sovereignty of the states being stripped back bit by bit by the federal government. I see the federal government taking on a sovereignty that it was never intended to have. In our system the people gave the bulk of their individual sovereignty over to the states and the states in turn gave a small piece of that sovereignty over to the federal government. In this we are not one nation comprised of several states; we are several states comprising one nation. The system is critically out of balance right now. This inbalance cannot remain. There are two peaceful ways of restoring balance: either the federal government withdraws to its intended role or the states act collectively to redraw the boundaries and sure up their powers again. I don't believe the federal government is capable of backing away from what its taken. So between the remaining peaceful choice and at a minimum significant civil strike, I'd take the Constitutional Convention. The convention is a high risk option, but we have only high risk options. The best way to achieve a more permanent solution is to renegotiate the union in a constitutional convention. This would send a signal to the federal government that will reverberate for the next 223 years or more.


a) The division of powers acts as a check on authority the same way that separation of powers does. Distorting that division by making one side (states) too powerful relative to the other will, by extension, hinder that check on authority. Seeing how the US culture seems obsessed with maintaining and even strengthening the limits/checks on government power, I do not see how this is a desirable approach.

b) Your argument is based on maintaining the status quo, or even "doubling down" on a constitutional framework that is over 200 years old and is widely considered by legal and constitutional scholars to be antiquated and not suitable for imitating
(even US Supreme Court Justices have said as much).
(source published in New York Law Review, can be downloaded here : http://papers.ssrn.com/....cfm?abstract_id=1923556)

Edited By: H4xOr WaNgEr on Nov 7th 2012, 19:54:13
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