http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2956370/posts?page=108#108
Good points all. Clearly the GOP model has failed and its adherents seem poised to acknowledge final failure. Time to consider new models and paths to success.
What is of interest and of substantial potential power in a new model is drawn from your statement:
“Fortunately we still hold the House and something like 3/4 of the State legislatures. And those facts will become far more important as the Obama downward spiral continues on toward next summer.”
If somehow the Red States comprising 3/4 of the total could start a State Convention movement, then the process of such a movement could bypass both Senate and the Presidency, and the Supreme Court.
As an example, look at the number of states pushing for Voter ID and having it moved through the courts with subsequent wins or imminent wins.
The same could happen with issues such as gay marriage, tax reform, education, energy etc. all brought under an umbrella of a States Convention process. The breadth of such a process would be too diffuse and difficult for the MSM to fight as they would need to define, caricature and demonize thousands of targets in geographical regions where they are not welcome.
The Founders left us the States Convention route as a last resort to withstand tyranny.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) could be a vehicle to organize a States Convention movement. The fact that leftist groups hate it is a good sign that its leadership is conservative.
Here’s a couple of leftist orgs and their take on ALEC:
http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10887/cmd-special-report-alecs-funding-and-spending
The chief complaint of a States Convention movement arises from fear that leftists can seize control of it and fundamentally change the Constitution. But a States Convention process to power requires 2/3s of state to pass proposals and 3/4s to implement passed proposals into the Constitution. So there is a strong barrier that the left would need to overcome in order to control power from statehouses.
The left has seized *federal* power from urban centers of population to steer a state to its US Senator picks as well as urban mayorships to service union demands, primarily government unions including public teacher groups. This is the source of their strength. Such a network of urban power strongholds was referred by Obama’s handlers in 2008 as the “Urban Archipelago” that can ignore Statehouses because power at the statehouse level is lacking.
But statehouses tied together and unified can trump the Urban Archipelago.
Statehouse power stems from people that inhabit the land outside the urban strongholds, the “Country Class” and this ‘country power’ when mobilized and impassioned yields power in the US House of Representatives as exists now.
In such areas there exists a diffuse republic in the form of distributed districts that lend considerable opportunity to steer state power. The Left has abandoned this route to power because the centralization of federal power has rendered Statehouses weak and ineffectual, but only because they are not organized together.
What is needed is a groundswell of solidarity to empower leaders of a State Convention movement to unite, organize and train cadres of people to effect Statehouse power.
It comes down to solidarity and the ability to organize and maintain it.
Good post. Heartening.