If the events in our nation's capital on January 6th, 2021 teach us anything, it's that drastic non-violent public involvement is needed to avert irreparable harm to our body politic.
On Wednesday January 6th, 2021 I (like no doubt most of the country) watched the events unfolding in horror. Notice I said "horror" not "shock and horror" because despite the hyperbole and hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and "moral outrage," you would have to have been living under a rock on one of Neptune's less fashionable moons to have not seen this coming.
And at this point I am going to clearly state that I don't care who lit the match, or what party they belonged to, or any of the other irrelevant tripe that has been bandied about for the past week by statesmen and pundits, wits and wasps. The president was (at best) either painfully irresponsible, or (at worst) downright seditious when he blew hot-air and poured gasoline over a smouldering mob; but no matter how much tinder you have in the box, there can be no conflagration without plenty of fuel stacked-up on the wayside, and that fuel regrettably has been stockpiled for so long, by so many people, and is so seasoned, a discarded cigarette could have set it off.
The events of last week seemingly revolve solely around Mr. Trump because he has made a fetish (if not a downright religion) of holding a magnifying glass to our worst instincts and tendencies. Abrasive, divisive, parochial, and condescending; I absolutely agree; one-hundred percent. But I would be hard pressed to not apply these same four adjectives to Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, or for that matter, even Barrack Obama, who (in my estimation) did just as much sneering as Donald Trump (albeit in a much classier pose) and just out of a different side of his mouth.
The point of this is not to act as apologist for Donald Trump; whatever benefit of the doubt I might have given him at one time as the duly elected President of the United States, evaporated in about twelve-seconds when I saw a thug in a bearskin storming the House Chamber, like an extra in a credit card commercial. One might almost have expected an Alec Baldwin voice-over, that is if it hadn't been chillingly real. Likewise, I am not here to flagellate Barack Obama, whose worst sin as far as I've ever seen, is a myopic idealism unsuited for politics.
The exposition over, let's ask ourselves what (if anything) we can do to extricate ourselves from this mess. And here I will add (politics aside) that anyone hoping for a savior in Joe Biden might as well wait for help from that aforementioned less-fashionable moon of Neptune. And this is not a slam against Mr. Biden personally; its just that in his entire career he has never given me one viable reason to suspect he can accomplish anything meaningful or comprehend anything complex. Its not like he got a few things wrong during his time in the senate, he got nearly everything wrong. My hope for Mr. Biden is that he takes a page out of Gerald Ford's playbook, smiles a lot, and talks in a steady, paternal voice. As for the rest of the government from the Speaker of the House to the incoming Senate Majority Leader. Well, it's not like we don't know what to expect. They have ALL been in Washington for so long that they practically wilt like an orchid in air conditioning if they ever have to leave the capital for so much as a weekend. No, if last week taught us nothing else it's that it's up to us, We The People to fix this mess, and not by protests and violence, but by the very law of the land itself; a Constitutional Convention.
Rather than go into a lengthy description of how it is done and what purview it can or cannot have (which is in itself an ongoing debate among constitutional scholars) I will cut to the chase and say it really doesn't matter. The First Constitutional Convention was convened to revise the Articles of Confederation whose delegates then promptly dropped the aforementioned Articles of Confederation into the fireplace and resolved to start a whole new form of government basically from scratch. And that is really what we need to do, because the root cause of our angst as a republic is that (from the start) we have always wanted to be two mutually incompatible things at once: a libertarian society with minimal governmental control (federal or otherwise) and a top-down national government with all the safety and security (and incursions into personal freedom) that that implies. A Constitutional Convention would allow the states and their delegates (preferably non-office holding ones) a chance to work-out their difference; and if they cannot, leave the union in peace.
What you say! Leave the union in peace! Yes. No less than our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, gives us this inalienable right; a right we have actively supported as a foreign policy since John Quincy Adams scribbled it out in the Monroe Doctrine. It's time to practice that we preach. Had we tried this constitutional remedy in the 1850s, we might have saved a few hundred thousand people from killing one another.
As I see it, each state should elect as many delegates as it has electors; preferable in an open state-wide election, and preferable with two of those delegates being appointed by the state legislature; this would act as a check to preserve some of the state's interests. Once the slate is elected, they should work in secret (like the original convention did) and preferably somewhere secluded (like Guam or Alaska: I'd vote for Guam myself) which would aid in the sequestration and also, in their motivation to get something done as quickly as prudent, and return to their homes. By no means should they meet anywhere near Washington D.C. Once the new and improved constitution is approved and signed by the convention, it would go to the states. Those who ratified it would be in; those that did not ratify it would be out. It is the only fair (and sane) solution I can envision.
This may seem drastic, but when we have people dying in the Capitol, it bears asking, what level of insanity we are willing to tolerate? We also need to ask ourselves as citizens of this republic, what will materially change this year, next year, or the year after that, that has not materially changed already? The arguments we are having as a citizenry are not new, only the method and ease of disseminating them are; and this has not (on balance) been a very positive development for our republic.
Of course this solution also takes guts. It will require integrity, altruism, compromise and pragmatism; the concepts once lauded by our founders like Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams as"republican values."
Beneath the rotunda of the Capitol, which was so violently assaulted last week, lays the unused crypt designed to hold the remains of George Washington. Never was that crypt more empty then it was last Wednesday, when insurgents stormed over it in a shoddy fever of contempt and rage.
Editor's Note: Next week (unless unforeseen events dictate otherwise) we will publish some recommendations as what a new Constitution for the United States might look like. Be peaceful and stay safe!
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