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Title: An Antidote to Big Government

Original CoS Document (slug): [[https://conventionofstates.com/an-antidote-to-big-government-1|an-antidote-to-big-government-1]]

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Created: 2021-11-30 13:01:34

Updated: 2022-09-01 09:47:44

Published: 2021-12-14 02:00:00

Converted: 2025-04-14T21:14:34.598817645


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The national debt is approaching $29 trillion. We have reached a point in our nation’s history that if we don’t do something substantial to contain and eventually roll back this debt, we will face an economic Armageddon. No country, no matter how large and powerful, can sustain that level of debt indefinitely without suffering financial collapse. To give you an idea of how large this debt is, it is the equivalent of the median family income of $86,011 in the US carrying a debt of $110,368, which represents 128 % of their annual income. If such a family had that amount of money in credit card debt and approached a bank for a personal loan, I would hope that any responsible banker would turn them down flat. Yet this is the indebtedness that we face as a nation.  Moreover, there is no end in sight, as both parties seek to increase this debt in endless pursuit of the most time-tested means of winning votes: spending more money.\\
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Clearly the system is broken and the only way to fix it is to amend the Constitution to require a balanced budget, limitations on taxes and spending and term limits. Yet how can we rely on Congress to enact such amendments when to do so would take away from them their best, sure-fire way to win votes and stay in office indefinitely? Sadly, we can’t.\\
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Fortunately, and thanks to the genius of our founders, they devised a way to amend the Constitution that would bypass Congress because they anticipated that there would be times when the public interest and the parochial interests of Congress when come into direct conflict. We are at one of those times.\\
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That method to amend the Constitution is spelled out in Article V which allows two-thirds of the state legislatures to convene a “Convention for proposing Amendments” instead of relying only on a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, which is how all previous amendments have been enacted. And I have more good news. A movement has risen up, called the Convention of States (COS) which has been established specifically for that purpose. Since 2014, 14 states* of both chambers of their state legislatures have passed the Convention Call, with 8 more states having the call passed in at least one of their chambers. Once we reach the two-thirds threshold of 33 states, history will have been made. Once that is accomplished, anything coming out of a convention would have to be ratified by “three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof…”\\
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As can be anticipated, progressives are adamantly opposed to the calling of a convention because it threatens what the French would call their raison d’etre; their reason for being. Spending more money and passing it on in the form of increased government debt on future generations is their sole claim to fame when it comes to getting and holding on to political power. So naturally they have engaged in a dis-information campaign, claiming that any Convention, convened under the provisions of Article V, would somehow magically “runaway” and stray from the language of the resolutions passed by the States.\\
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Sadly, joining them in this campaign are fringe elements of the political right, specifically The John Birch Society and The Eagle Forum, with the former famously claiming that President Eisenhower was an agent of a worldwide communist conspiracy. If there ever were two organizations that could best be described as paranoid and sharing a world view of sinister conspiracies lurking in the wings, it would be these two groups. In fact, their campaign of fear and distortion against the COS even found voice within the Republican Party of Cobb County, where its resolutions committee attempted, earlier this year, to pass a resolution condemning COS and prohibit the County GOP from supporting any candidate that did not disavow the COS. Fortunately, saner heads prevailed, and the resolution was overwhelmingly defeated by the party’s membership. The fact that any organization which purports to be conservative would oppose a movement whose only purpose is to constrain government power, is a sad testimony to the dark power that paranoia can exercise over the human mind.\\
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Going forward, I remain confident that the COS will eventually prevail, and encourage those reading this column to do their own research and determine for yourselves if COS holds forth the promise that I most fervently believe it does.

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·       Georgia was the first state to call for a Convention.\\
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//Lance Lamberton is a retired free-lance writer, a COS volunteer, and a precinct chair of the Cobb GOP.//