After a close battle that featured several late nights, the Oklahoma State House of Representatives has decided not to vote to apply for a constitutional convention (con-con) under the authority of Article V of the Constitution. Put simply, the votes needed to approve the con-con application were not there, and it’s now dead for this year’s legislative session in Oklahoma.
This is a crucial victory in the struggle to protect the Constitution and the fundamental liberties it protects from the possible ravages that could result from a second constitutional convention.
Dr. Mike Ritze, a key member of the constitutionally minded bloc of the Oklahoma House of Representatives who successfully derailed the Con-Con locomotive in the Sooner State, told The New American that the fight was close and the hour was late, but in the end, a majority of his colleagues decided “they did not want to open the Pandora’s box of a con-con.” Ritze supports state nullification of unconstitutional federal laws as the far safer approach for reining in the federal government.
The good doctor’s sense of the threat to freedom posed by an Article V convention is right. Historically, constitutionally, and legally such a convention as is being promoted by many on the Right and the Left is unsafe and built on the weak foundation of the hope that delegates to such a convention would preserve the Constitution as we know it today.
Opponents like Dr. Ritze, however, prefer to follow the sound advice of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Kentucky Resolution of 1798, “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.”
Advocates of an Article V convention counter that there are safeguards built into the process that would ultimately protect the Constitution from amendments that could repeal the Bill of Rights.
The problem with such comforting promises, however, is that a con-con would not be peopled with delegates devoted to keeping the core principles of the Constitution intact. Rather, there are billions being spent by George Soros and other admitted socialists and progressives who admit to aiming at making fundamental changes to the Constitution should an Article V convention actually occur.
The New American has covered the manifold menaces lurking within the Article V con-con movement. Ritze reports that many of these articles and other materials produced by The New American were instrumental in convincing his colleagues in the Oklahoma House to choose not to call for a con-con.
Of course, the claim that without such a convention the country will soon fall into ruin and annihilation was the very attitude anti-Federalists once called “the argument of tyrants.”
Friends of the Constitution congratulate Dr. Ritze and his fellow representatives for their wise decision to protect the Constitution from tinkering by those anxious to take a wrench to the delicate gears of our Republic.
The battle is not over, however. Legislatures in several states are considering similar bills supporting calls for a con-con of one sort or another. Liberty minded citizens in every state, therefore, are encouraged to contact their state representatives and senators, informing them of their opposition to an Article V con-con and to familiarize these lawmakers with the significant and irreparable harm that such a convention could do to our Constitution and the liberties it protects.
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels nationwide speaking on nullification, the Second Amendment, the surveillance state, and other constitutional issues. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at [email protected].
