Marianne Moran, believes that it’s time that states have the ability to fight back, Congress and the President have have pushed forward laws that most people in most states simply do not want. The new amendment would give us recourse.
A Tea Party activist is working to get state backing for a constitutional convention to pass a constitutional amendment that would give two-thirds of the states the ability to repeal congressional acts, such as the new health care law.
“It restores a lot of the sovereignty and a lot of the power that the states have lost,” said Marianne Moran, executive director of RepealAmendment.org and *former executive director of Tea Party In Action.
The Tenth Amendment has become useless because of Supreme Court decisions that have expanded federal power and because of the Seventeenth Amendment that stripped state legislatures of their right to name U.S. senators, Moran said.
This would go a long way toward reestablishing the balance of state rights against federalist power, and seems like an idea worth concidering.
The problem with the amendment to allow two-thirds of the States to rescind a specific federal law or regulation is that it is retail when the problem is wholesale. We need to redress the underlying distortions of the Constitution which have allowed the federal government to usurp the States’ original constitutional powers, not nitpick at separate individual usurpations.
Also, there is a problem with using an Article V convention to initiate federalism amendments. Such a convention would be dominated by politicians and law professors, not constitutional conservatives, and would be as likely to move us away from the original constitutional structure as towards it.
The best solution is an “amendment amendment” which gives the States the ability to initiate constitutional amendments without a convention. Article V only uses a convention mechanism because in 1789 there was no other practical way for States to communicate with each other to formulate amendment proposals. In this way, grassroots constitutionalists could initiate amendments carefully drafted to achieve the restoration of the original constitutional structure, thus dealing with the underlying “wholesale” problem of the unconstitutional expansion of the national government.
See timelyrenewed dot com for more specifics on this proposal.