Rising Hegemon
Eric Cantor is part of a class of Republicans who say they want to change the country fundamentally -- and to that end, Cantor isn't dismissing a plan by legislators in his home state of Virgina to blow up the Constitutional system and replace it with one that would give state governments veto power over federal laws.
The people pushing this idea are doing so with the purpose of negating the 16th and 17th Amendments (direct income tax and direct election of Senators). So they want an Amendment to overturn what they don't like about other Amendments.
Great Eric, so how about this...rather than just use this on things like high tariffs and health care, states are allowed to withhold their National Guards from being used overseas?
Or maybe they can ignore the 13th Amendment and bring back slavery?
John C. Calhoun would definitely have gotten behind that one.
[cross-posted at Firedoglake]
6 comments:
The Seventeenth Amendment was the direct result of the corruption that had overtaken the Senate, especially through the 1880s and 1890s, culminating in Mark Hanna's (Karl Rove's role model) passing out cash on the Senate floor.
Now, one could rightly say that corruption has become more sophisticated today, that the really corrupt money is paid through the revolving door and on the private jet, but, why on earth would anyone want to bring back a system which invited corruption and caused it to flourish unless one were wholly corrupt himself?
The answer is secession by the blue states. Let them go and have the door hit them on the way out. Then maybe we can move into the 21st century.
Just like ala carte Christians, they now want ala carte government.
Ya know, we already tried that under the Articles of Confederation. Fail.
I can't imagine that they would confine themselves to trying to eliminate just one or two amendments - there's also the "no religious test" clause and the first amendment clause on religious establishment.
Either as a nation we stand united or we break up into a confederacy of competing principalities with no central control - which conveniently would lead to easier erosion of hard won civil rights' gains.
For all the Tea Party propaganda about how the founding fathers wanted a small constitutional government, when the founders had to actually run a new and rapidly growing and expanding nation, the radical rhetoric gave way to more practical considerations. George Washington was the first president to realize that the nationhood that he had fought for was jeopardized by the limited-government notions contained in the Articles of Confederation.
Radical revolutionary rhetoric does not run a country.
They want to lead us to the Balkanization and downfall of the US.
Yes, sounds like they've got the whole "Americans are Exceptional" thing down pat.... except for one small thing, he's forgetting that our strength and "exceptionalism" as a country comes not from individual states, but from the collective willingness of all the states to work together as ONE. Break that bond by giving individual states opt out power on shit they don't like, and you've diminished the collective power, not just within our own borders, but around the world as well...
when can we say sedition?
I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind anyone who might be reading this that Lowell's monument to those who fought in the War of the Rebellion features a statue of a winged Nike, her garment rippling in the breeze, holding aloft a laurel wreath, as if to bestow it on the brow of the downtown.
I understand they have a quite a few monuments to the War of the Rebellion down Mr. Cantor's way, but I doubt any of them feature similar iconography.
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