SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
far right extremism
Constitutional Convention: A Right-Wing Fever Dream Would Destroy This Nation Once and for All
Time to wake up, people. It's no longer just a dream—but a nightmare one step closer to happening.
Dec 14, 2023
One of the right’s favorite fever dreams over the years has been to gut the US Constitution of many of its checks and balances and officially turn America into a legal oligarchy with a strongman presidency, nearly bulletproof legal immunity for the morbidly rich, and full personhood for corporations.
As of this month, it’s no longer just a dream.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) completed their winter “National Policy Summit” get-together in Scottsdale, Arizona last week with Speaker Mike Johnson as its keynote speaker. This is the group that’s brought “Stand Your Ground” and voter suppression “model legislation” to Red states across America and, for fifty years now, has been bringing together corporate lobbyists and Republican state-level politicians to make state after state more corporate- and billionaire-friendly.
If their plan works, these Republican toadies of the billionaires who fund and own them will rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process.
At this recent meeting they rolled out a new strategy to convene a Constitutional Convention, so they can finally remake America in their own image: they’re going to try to get the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — who all have direct or indirect ties back to ALEC, its related/affiliated organizations, and/or its funders — to go along with it.
Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold (now a professor of law and president of the American Constitution Society) is not prone to hyperbole; he’s always been a thoughtful and measured speaker and writer. So, it’s worth taking him seriously when he recently said of MAGA Mike Johnson:
“It is alarming to have a speaker of the House who supports the extremist Convention of States movement, which is striving to radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution.”
Please consider the horrifying possibilities.
- Imagine if most public schools in the country closed and were replaced by for-profit charter and private academies — often racially segregated and only serving families who could afford their tuition — because the Constitution forbade state-level compulsory education laws and taxpayer funding for education (at all levels).
- Imagine if the U.S. Constitution required the EPA, FDA, USDA, DOT, Department of Education, and Department of Labor to shut down. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with an end to the national minimum wage and the income tax, both individual and corporate.
- Imagine that the new billionaire-written Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks, and even big food and pharma — all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures — because the Constitution now prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can no longer even enforce voting or civil rights laws.
- Imagine if Citizens United and its position that political bribery is merely a First Amendment exercise of “free speech” were put into the US Constitution so it can never be overturned by Congress or a future court, meaning that whichever political candidates have the backing of the wealthiest donors pretty much win every election for the rest of American history.
- Imagine if the free and independent press protections of the First Amendment are gone and, like in today’s Hungary and Russia, politicians can sue anybody who writes anything about them for defamation or slander, effectively putting any kind of opposition media or even honest news operations out of business.
- Imagine, to add injury to insult, that the federal government has shut down Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, Pell grants, housing supports, and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate, or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do because they’re now unconstitutional.
Morbidly rich billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to do all this and more.
They want to provide corporations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits while chopping away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security, child labor laws, or inheritance, income, and wealth taxes.
The Constitution provides for three ways to change or amend itself. The first is that Congress can propose a constitutional amendment, pass it with a supermajority in both houses, and have three-quarters of the states ratify it. This is the way it’s been done for every one of the existing 27 amendments.
The second strategy is done by using Article V of the Constitution and driving the process up from the states. The easiest way to do this is for three-quarters of the states to legislatively approve (with simple majority votes in the legislatures of each state) an amendment, in which case Congress is unnecessary and upon ratification by the 38th state, it becomes a permanent amendment to the Constitution.
While this strategy has never been used, it’s one process many of the good-government groups like Move To Amend and Public Citizen are pushing for a “Corporations are not people, and money is not speech” amendment to reverse Citizens United.
The third — and incredibly dangerous — strategy to amend the Constitution is to simply call a “Convention of the States,” again using Article V, and open the entire document itself up to rewriting and tinkering.
This third strategy is the one ALEC was pushing this month. If they can pull it off in the states (where it’s cheaper to buy politicians), then Congress, state governors, the president, and even the courts would have no say over it. And ALEC has spent the past 50 years becoming a major — some would say controlling — factor in Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Their barrier has been that it takes 34 states to call for a convention, and there have never been that many states calling call for one at the same time since the founding of our republic. However, as was pointed out at ALEC last week, every state except Hawaii has — at one time or another, starting with Virginia in 1788 — passed a resolution proposing a constitutional convention (there have been 400 such resolutions since the founding of our nation).
While most of history’s resolutions for a convention have been specific to one issue or another (New York’s 1789 resolution called for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution, for example, something that Congress and the states did in 1791), a half-dozen were simply calls for a convention without specifics. These are sometimes referred to as “generic” convention resolutions.
The theory pushed at ALEC, first rolled out three years ago at an ALEC workshop by conservative activist David Biddulph but now apparently fully endorsed, is to combine the existing 28 Red state resolutions along with the six “generic” ones (going all the way back to 1789) to hit the magic number of 34 states to open the convention.
The key to the strategy is to get it before the Supreme Court and let the billionaire-owned Republican justices do ALEC’s work for it by ruling that those old resolutions are still valid, even though the people who proposed and passed them are all long dead.
Utah Republican State Rep. Ken Ivory told ALEC lawmakers it was imperative to get the issue before the Supreme Court:
“Please join us in the state of Utah as we look into the legal mechanisms that we have under the Constitution… to [get the Court to] declare that Congress must count the [old] applications. … And if, as we believe, we’ve already achieved 34 applications to Congress for a fiscal responsibility convention, call [it]… and hold a Convention of States.”
If their plan works, these Republican toadies of the billionaires who fund and own them will rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process. Only state legislatures are necessary for rewriting the Constitution and then ratifying their own work, according to Article V of the Constitution, and governors can’t veto their actions.
Much like the many cases that have suddenly burst onto the scene and then been used by the six corrupt Republicans on the Court to alter American law and take away citizens’ rights, this one could move quickly. Now that the ALEC meeting is over, expect to see states begin putting together the lawsuits or other legal actions necessary to get this proposal before the Court.
Alexander Hamilton was prescient: in the last sentence of Federalist 85, he warns us of efforts to re-write or replace our Constitution:
“I dread the more the consequences of new attempts, because I know that powerful individuals, in this and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every possible shape.”
Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy have been at the forefront of sounding the alarm and I’ve hot-linked their names to their most recent articles about the work they’re doing to try to stop the billionaire machine devoted to rewriting our Constitution.
Please check them out, get on their mailing lists, and spread the word. This is one of those things that Republicans on the Court could use to seemingly spring out of nowhere and bring down our democracy once and for all.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Media Coverage Must Stop Equating Congress’s Far Left and Far Right
Whenever lawmakers are debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far right and far left, as if these are similar forces.
Jun 03, 2023
Here’s how, in its lead story Thursday, The New York Timesdescribed the House’s vote to resolve Republicans’ self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis:
“With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.”
It’s not just the Times. This false equivalence between the two parties’ activist wings has been on display in press coverage throughout the debt-ceiling votes. Politico Playbook on Sunday described Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal’s mixed reaction to the debt-ceiling compromise as indicating that the bill may have “a chance to win votes from some on the far left.” A Washington Post sub-headline that same day noted that “far-left and far-right corners of the House have criticized the compromise.”
These descriptions conjure a world in which the wing of the Republican Party defined by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Chip Roy (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) is somehow balanced out by the wing of the Democratic Party defined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jayapal (D-Wash.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).
On a scale of political ideology and positions from 100 to 0 (with 100 being the far left and 0 being the far right), and 50 being in the middle, even the most left-oriented Democrats (Ocasio-Cortez, Bush, Casar, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists.
This idea is, of course, farcical—both in terms of the vote on the debt-ceiling bill and our politics more generally. Yet whenever Congress is debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far right and far left, as if these are similar forces.
In the case of the debt-ceiling compromise, 46 House Democrats and 71 House Republicans voted “no” on the legislation.
The Democrats who voted “no” range from liberals like Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) to progressives like Rosa DeLauro (D-Md.), Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Jayapal and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) to democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Bush.
According to the Times’ own analysis, 40 of the 100 members of the Progressive Caucus (40%) voted “no,” while 34 out of 42 (81%) of hard-right Republicans (which the Times defines as members of the Freedom Caucus and those who opposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker) voted “no.”
Two Republicans (Boebert and Jim Banks of Indiana) and two Democrats (Angie Craig of Minnesota and Deborah Ross of Pennsylvania) didn’t vote. Interestingly, two of the most reactionary Republicans, Greene and Stefanik, voted “yes”—a testament to their closeness with McCarthy, who appointed them to influential committees.
It is difficult to rank House members on an ideological scale because rankings look solely at voting records, and each organization that attempts to rank members selects different votes as crucial. The more important point, though, is not necessarily about voting records. It’s a question of how we define “extremism.”
On a scale of political ideology and positions from 100 to 0 (with 100 being the far left and 0 being the far right), and 50 being in the middle, even the most left-oriented Democrats (Ocasio-Cortez, Bush, Casar, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are different shades of social democrats; they espouse policies that are fairly mainstream across western democracies. They advocate for the rights of marginalized people and are pro-union, pro-choice, and concerned about climate change. They want to expand the social safety net, favor progressive taxation, and want to raise the minimum wage.
In contrast, the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries. Many rub shoulders with, and speak in support of, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and anti-Semites. In many cases, they want to repeal the political and cultural victories of the civil rights, feminist, gay rights, environmental, and labor movements. They deny that the 2020 election was legitimate, and took steps to overturn it. They support the January 6 insurrectionists, who they cast as freedom fighters. They have opposed the fundamentals of democracy—like the right to vote and the peaceful transition of power—and, in some cases, played active roles in the closest thing to a coup the U.S. has experienced in its nearly 250-year history.
It might be tempting to say that extremism is in the eye of the beholder. Ocasio-Cortez thinks that Greene is an extremist and vice versa. But for the media to continually create this false equivalence between the “far right” and the “far left” is misleading and distorts a crucial, critical reality of American politics in 2023—one that looms behind even the most anodyne legislative battle.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Rally in Waco Called Not a Dog Whistle, But a 'Blaring Air Horn' to Far-Right
"There's not really another place in the U.S. that you could pick that would tap into these deep veins of anti-government hatred—Christian nationalist skepticism of the government," said one extremism expert.
Mar 24, 2023
While former U.S. President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign insists it is purely coincidental that his planned Saturday rally in Waco, Texas falls during the 30th anniversary of a deadly 51-day siege targeting a religious cult, some Texans and extremism experts aren't buying it.
Since law enforcement—including Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents—carried out the botched operation at a Branch Davidian compound near Waco from February 28 to April 19 in 1993, the event has been a source of anti-government sentiment for the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and U.S. militia movement members.
"When Donald Trump flies into Waco on Saturday evening for the first major campaign event of his 2024 reelection quest, dog ears won't be the only ones twitching," the Houston Chronicle editorial board argued Thursday. "Trump doesn't do subtle; dog-whistle messages are not his style. The more apt metaphor is the blaring air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10."
"'Waco' has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists."
"The GOP-friendly city of Waco—Trump won McLennan County by more than 20 percentage points in 2020—has every right, of course, to host a former president, the leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, but 'Waco,' the symbol... means something else entirely," the board stressed. "'Waco' has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, and other anti-government extremists and conspiracists."
The twice-impeached former president faces potential legal trouble in multiple states and at the federal level for everything from a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to trying to overturn his 2020 electoral loss and inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump, a documented serial liar, took to his Truth Social platform last weekend to say that he would be arrested Tuesday—as part of a New York grand jury investigation into the hush money—and call for protests. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said Thursday that Trump "created a false expectation that he would be arrested."
In a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump
warned of "death and destruction" if he is indicted—which led the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to charge that "he's not being subtle, he's threatening prosecutors with violence."
The Chronicle board tied Trump's legal problems to his Waco trip:
Thirty years later, the anti-government paramilitary groups feeding off lies about the "deep state" and a stolen election periodically visit the modest, little chapel on the site of the sprawling, ramshackle building that burned to the ground. Although the Branch Davidians had nothing to do with anti-government conspiracists, chapel construction was funded by loud-mouthed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Militia members and conspiracists know exactly what Trump's Waco visit symbolizes. They have heard him castigate the FBI and the "deep state," particularly after agents searched for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. How they'll respond to his remarks, particularly if he shows up as the first former president in American history to face criminal charges, has law enforcement in Waco and beyond taking every precaution. What he says will likely set the tone for the presidential campaign to come. Every American should be concerned.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote Friday in an email to The New York Times that Waco was chosen "because it is centrally located and close to all four of Texas' biggest metropolitan areas—Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio—while providing the necessary infrastructure to hold a rally of this magnitude."
The Chronicle board noted other local options, writing that "the Waco Regional Airport and an expected crowd of 10,000 or so fit the bill. Of course, Temple or Belton or Killeen (home to Fort Hood) would have fit the bill, as well—without the weight of symbolism."
The Texas newspaper was far from alone in sounding the alarm about Trump's upcoming trip to Waco.
"Waco is hugely symbolic on the far right," Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told USA TODAY. "There's not really another place in the U.S. that you could pick that would tap into these deep veins of anti-government hatred—Christian nationalist skepticism of the government—and I find it hard to believe that Trump doesn't know that Waco represents all of these things."
"Waco has a sense of grievance among people that I know he's got to be trying to tap into," Beirich added. "He's being unjustly accused, like the Branch Davidians were unjustly accused—and the deep state is out to get them all."
The newspaper pointed out that "though Trump has held more than 100 campaign rallies and similar events, and mounted a near-daily schedule of them during his campaigns, this week's appears to be the first one ever held in Waco."
Megan Squire, deputy director for data analytics at the Southern Poverty Law Center, also rejected the Trump campaign's suggestion that the trip isn't connected to the 1993 standoff and what means to many members of the far-right.
"Give me a break! There's no reason to go to Waco, Texas, other than one thing," Squire told USA TODAY. "I can't even fathom what that's about other than just a complete dog whistle—actually forget dog whistle, that is just a train whistle to the folks who still remember that event and are still mad about it."
Even some right-wing figures are openly making the connection, as TIMEreported: "Posting on the messaging app Telegram, far-right activist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called the rally in Waco 'very symbolic!' A few MAGA influencers on social media noted the choice of location, with one calling it 'a meaningful shot across the brow of the deep state.'"
Nicole Hemmer, a Vanderbilt University associate professor of history and author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, wrote in a Friday opinion piece for CNN that Trump's trip is "a provocation of historic significance."
"When Trump became president in 2016, rather than becoming synonymous with the federal government as previous chief executives had done, he styled himself as both its victim and its adversary, promoting conspiracies about the deep state and encouraging supporters to keep him in power by any means necessary," Hemmer highlighted. "In choosing Waco as the kickoff site for his campaign rallies, he has signaled that his courtship of extremist groups will continue, and that he sees his role as a pivotal figure in the far-right mythos as central to his efforts to retake the presidency."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular