WEBVTT NOTE The Political and Legal Frameworks for an Article V Balanced Budget Constitutional Convention 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.820 My brief presentation is titled The Political and Legal Framework for an Article 5 Balanced 2 00:00:05.820 --> 00:00:09.120 Budget Constitutional Convention. 3 00:00:09.120 --> 00:00:14.940 We know from Rod's presentation and Mike's that two things, the severity of the crisis 4 00:00:14.940 --> 00:00:22.780 is almost unimaginable, it's imminent, the Congress is incapable politically and structurally 5 00:00:22.780 --> 00:00:27.740 of doing much about it, and the frameworks anticipated this type of political crisis 6 00:00:27.740 --> 00:00:33.380 And they use that type of language, political crises, and that's why Article 5 and its 7 00:00:33.380 --> 00:00:37.060 present form was included in the Constitution. 8 00:00:37.060 --> 00:00:43.800 Because the states were supposedly sovereign, it would be a state response to a national 9 00:00:43.800 --> 00:00:46.000 crisis. 10 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:51.780 Now how would we operationalize an Article 5 Constitutional Convention? 11 00:00:51.780 --> 00:00:57.020 Now that's changed and the operationalization of a convention isn't necessarily what the 12 00:00:57.020 --> 00:01:03.020 The framers had in mind, but it is what we're stuck with because the court has ruled on the matter. 13 00:01:03.020 --> 00:01:10.020 The framers' intent behind Article 5 is clear and indisputable. 14 00:01:10.020 --> 00:01:16.020 When two-thirds of the states apply for a constitutional amendment convention to propose an amendment 15 00:01:16.020 --> 00:01:23.020 for three-fourths of the states to ratify, the United States Congress must convene the said convention. 16 00:01:23.020 --> 00:01:28.980 However, the Congress does have discretion in the manner in which the Convention will 17 00:01:28.980 --> 00:01:34.220 be convened, and it's in that discretion that presents some problems. 18 00:01:34.220 --> 00:01:38.620 Because an Article 5 Convention has never been convened, there is neither historical 19 00:01:38.620 --> 00:01:42.640 nor statutory precedent to guide the process. 20 00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:47.700 The lack of precedent alarms many would-be well-intentioned supporters of a Convention, 21 00:01:47.700 --> 00:01:52.100 Amendment Convention, to add a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 22 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:58.940 However, it also provides an unfortunate opportunity for supporters of the status quo, that is 23 00:01:58.940 --> 00:02:04.060 unsustainable debt and political corruption, and that's what this debt is. 24 00:02:04.060 --> 00:02:09.420 It's simply the symptom of political corruption, not only at the national but at the state 25 00:02:09.420 --> 00:02:15.300 level and within the American political culture, to make nougatory what are the most effective 26 00:02:15.300 --> 00:02:20.440 of Weapons and the Constitutional Arsenal to make government accountable to the governed, 27 00:02:20.440 --> 00:02:23.900 the base government upon the consent of the governed. 28 00:02:23.900 --> 00:02:31.660 Now there is, especially in the 1950s and 60s, there's precedent about this open constitutional 29 00:02:31.660 --> 00:02:37.340 convention and the risk that the American public would incur as a result of getting 30 00:02:37.340 --> 00:02:39.700 the states together. 31 00:02:39.700 --> 00:02:45.340 It's a tactic used by those that support the status quo. 32 00:02:45.340 --> 00:02:52.100 But I'm going to try to make clear that these alarmist arguments are specious. 33 00:02:52.100 --> 00:02:58.820 In other words, the Supreme Court case in 1939, Coleman v. Miller and Senator Sam Irvin's 34 00:02:58.820 --> 00:03:05.660 legislative blueprint for an Article V constitutional amendment convention, both of these make manifest 35 00:03:05.660 --> 00:03:08.620 that the process would be constrained and effective. 36 00:03:08.620 --> 00:03:16.060 In other words, the risk of an open-ended constitutional convention that would be anti-liberty rather 37 00:03:16.060 --> 00:03:25.340 than pro-liberty is, I don't want to say irrational, but it's ill-founded. 38 00:03:25.340 --> 00:03:33.580 In 1939, the United States Supreme Court set the parameters of its role vis-a-vis the Congress 39 00:03:33.580 --> 00:03:36.860 in an Article 5 legal challenges. 40 00:03:36.860 --> 00:03:42.580 The precedent-setting case in 1939 involved child labor laws, and I'm not going to go 41 00:03:42.580 --> 00:03:49.720 into that, but the result of the 1939 case law is what's known as the Vitality Argument. 42 00:03:49.720 --> 00:03:59.060 The Vitality Argument was based upon the following. From June 1924 to March of 1927, this amendment 43 00:03:59.060 --> 00:04:04.980 had been rejected by 26 states, ratified by five. The state's rejections and failure of 44 00:04:04.980 --> 00:04:14.480 and the ratification resulted in the loss of the proposed amendment's vitality and therefore ceased to be open to ratification in 1937. 45 00:04:14.480 --> 00:04:25.480 In other words, too much time had lapsed between the introduction petitioning the Congress to convene a constitutional convention and when they reached the requisite two-thirds. 46 00:04:25.480 --> 00:04:29.480 In other words, the movement had lost its vitality. 47 00:04:29.480 --> 00:04:35.480 In other words, the lapse of time resulted in a de facto rescission of the proposed amendment. 48 00:04:35.480 --> 00:04:42.480 Now running for the court, Chief Justice Hughes addresses the following issues about an Article 5 constitutional convention. 49 00:04:42.480 --> 00:04:45.480 And I'm presenting it in a series of questions. 50 00:04:45.480 --> 00:04:51.480 Can ratification by state legislatures of a proposed amendment once given be rescinded? 51 00:04:51.480 --> 00:04:54.480 And the court said no, it cannot. 52 00:04:54.480 --> 00:05:03.480 Once a state legislature petitions to Congress and or ratifies, those actions cannot be rescinded by subsequent state legislatures. 53 00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:09.480 Second, can rejection by state legislatures a proposed amendment be subsequently ratified? 54 00:05:09.480 --> 00:05:17.480 Yes, they can refuse to approve ratification, but they can subsequently approve. 55 00:05:17.480 --> 00:05:23.480 A newly elected legislature or a new legislative session can approve it. The court said that's acceptable. 56 00:05:23.480 --> 00:05:29.720 Third, if ratification is by state conventions, having adjourned and signing die, can the 57 00:05:29.720 --> 00:05:33.360 conventions be reassembled to ratify or reject a proposed amendment? 58 00:05:33.360 --> 00:05:34.680 The court says no. 59 00:05:34.680 --> 00:05:40.360 The reason why this is important, there are over 300 petitions to the United States Congress 60 00:05:40.360 --> 00:05:46.280 from the states for constitutional convention for a balanced budget amendment. 61 00:05:46.280 --> 00:05:47.280 Over 300. 62 00:05:47.280 --> 00:05:52.560 Can a proposed amendment lose its vitality through the lapse of time? 63 00:05:52.560 --> 00:05:58.200 Chief Justice Hughes asserts that this is the more serious question. 64 00:05:58.200 --> 00:06:02.600 After addressing the merits of and providing suggestive answers to the various questions, 65 00:06:02.600 --> 00:06:09.420 the court concluded that the issues are ultimately non-justiciable and thereby political questions 66 00:06:09.420 --> 00:06:12.480 for the United States Congress to resolve. 67 00:06:12.480 --> 00:06:17.100 In other words, you can't go to the court and say that the Congress is not responding 68 00:06:17.100 --> 00:06:19.280 to the petition. 69 00:06:19.280 --> 00:06:24.020 That falls under, since 1939, the Political Questions Doctrine. 70 00:06:24.020 --> 00:06:28.680 So here you have the Congress that's refusing to balance the budget. 71 00:06:28.680 --> 00:06:33.440 The states respond by petitioning the Congress to convene a convention for a balanced budget 72 00:06:33.440 --> 00:06:40.240 amendment, but it's up to the Congress whether or not to recognize those petitions. 73 00:06:40.240 --> 00:06:45.700 In its concurring opinion, Justice Black, joined by three other justices, went even further. 74 00:06:45.700 --> 00:06:50.280 Because the case is non-justiciable, the case should be dismissed because the petitioners 75 00:06:50.280 --> 00:06:56.700 lack standing to sue, because the court, under the ash-winder rules of the Tennessee Valley 76 00:06:56.700 --> 00:07:03.100 case, authority case, said that the court cannot address political questions. 77 00:07:03.100 --> 00:07:08.700 These justices contended that the Congress has, quote, exclusive constitutional authority 78 00:07:08.700 --> 00:07:13.380 over submission and ratification of amendments. 79 00:07:13.380 --> 00:07:18.220 Even though Article 5 says they shall convene a convention, the Court says now they have 80 00:07:18.220 --> 00:07:21.320 discretion whether or not to convene. 81 00:07:21.320 --> 00:07:25.480 In his long dissenting opinion, Justice Butler argued that the issue of what constitutes 82 00:07:25.480 --> 00:07:33.440 a reasonable time and affect the application's vitality for ratification is justiciable. 83 00:07:33.440 --> 00:07:38.340 In this particular case, he agreed with the petitioners that a reasonable time had elapsed 84 00:07:38.340 --> 00:07:44.340 and that the 1937 Kansas ratification of the amendment was null and void. 85 00:07:44.340 --> 00:07:50.260 Only the 20th and 21st amendments have time limits for ratification and those are amendments 86 00:07:50.260 --> 00:07:54.580 that were proposed by the Congress, two-thirds of the Congress, three-fourths of the states 87 00:07:54.580 --> 00:07:57.780 had to ratify. 88 00:07:57.780 --> 00:08:01.540 Under this interpretation, the 27th amendment to the U.S. Constitution would not have been 89 00:08:01.540 --> 00:08:08.300 ratified if the Congress had decided to block ratification because that goes back to 1791 90 00:08:08.300 --> 00:08:15.020 Actually, 1789 wasn't ratified until the mid-1990s. Vitality has been lost. 91 00:08:16.140 --> 00:08:21.020 But it also makes clear that the hundreds of outstanding applications for constitutional 92 00:08:21.020 --> 00:08:25.740 amendment conventions, including those for a balanced budget convention, could and probably 93 00:08:25.740 --> 00:08:31.660 would be dismissed as lacking vitality. So even though you have all these outstanding petitions 94 00:08:31.660 --> 00:08:35.900 by the states to convene a constitutional convention, the Congress can ignore them. 95 00:08:35.900 --> 00:08:42.540 under this 1939 decision that they're old, they're stale, they don't really reflect 96 00:08:42.540 --> 00:08:47.840 the will of the states that made those petitions to the Congress. 97 00:08:47.840 --> 00:08:57.420 The political question doctrine is a slippery juristic concept. Dating back to 1796, the 98 00:08:57.420 --> 00:09:02.440 Supreme Court has invoked the doctrine in varying circumstances. Political question 99 00:09:02.440 --> 00:09:06.640 Constitutional criteria include A, the Constitution has assigned the issue to another co-equal 100 00:09:06.640 --> 00:09:11.680 branch of the government, in this case the Congress. B, there is not a judicial remedy 101 00:09:11.680 --> 00:09:16.400 for the controversy. If the Supreme Court says convene the Convention Congress and Congress 102 00:09:16.400 --> 00:09:22.440 ignores, the Court has no way of enforcing it because the President is outside the loop. 103 00:09:22.440 --> 00:09:29.480 The President is not involved in a Constitutional Convention. It just requires a resolution 104 00:09:29.480 --> 00:09:31.400 by both branches of the Congress. 105 00:09:31.400 --> 00:09:37.480 C, a judicial decision would bring another branch of government into disrepute. 106 00:09:37.480 --> 00:09:41.320 In other words, it would be embarrassing the Congress. 107 00:09:41.320 --> 00:09:46.440 Justice Brennan referred to these criteria as the analytical threads necessary to determine 108 00:09:46.440 --> 00:09:51.800 if an issue falls under the political question doctrine and therefore is non-justiciable. 109 00:09:51.800 --> 00:09:54.660 You can't go to the courts for a remedy. 110 00:09:54.660 --> 00:09:59.240 The relevance of the political question doctrine for Article 5 is that the Court has decided 111 00:09:59.240 --> 00:10:05.540 It lacks jurisdiction over the amendment process. In other words, the political arena, not the 112 00:10:05.540 --> 00:10:11.240 judicial, will decide the issue. However, the court may change its mind, as it did regarding 113 00:10:11.240 --> 00:10:15.900 legislative apportionment in Baker v. Carr when it reversed Colgrove v. Green. In other 114 00:10:15.900 --> 00:10:23.000 words, it could reverse Coleman v. Miller, but that's highly unlikely, highly unlikely. 115 00:10:23.000 --> 00:10:27.240 In that reversal, the writing for the majority, writing for the majority, Justice Brennan 116 00:10:27.240 --> 00:10:33.520 and specifically cites Coleman v. Miller as precedent, reaffirming that controversies 117 00:10:33.520 --> 00:10:39.680 pertaining to amending the Constitution are political and therefore outside the court's 118 00:10:39.680 --> 00:10:40.680 jurisdiction. 119 00:10:40.680 --> 00:10:45.060 Now, what I'm getting at is that the only check on the Congress is not the other branches 120 00:10:45.060 --> 00:10:50.720 of the national government, it is the states, the states. 121 00:10:50.720 --> 00:10:55.800 And even if they were participants in checking the Congress for not acting under Article 122 00:10:55.800 --> 00:11:01.800 Article 5 mandates, it's highly unlikely that the Congress would do it anyway. 123 00:11:01.800 --> 00:11:05.560 The significance of Coleman v. Miller for a balanced budget constitutional amendment 124 00:11:05.560 --> 00:11:11.560 convention is profound. First, under the well-established political questions doctrine, it confers on 125 00:11:11.560 --> 00:11:16.760 the U.S. Congress the political discretion to convene an Article 5 constitutional amendment 126 00:11:16.760 --> 00:11:22.200 convention today if it had the political will to do so. In other words, depending upon how 127 00:11:22.200 --> 00:11:27.440 How you read the language of the petitions to the Congress, there are the requisite 34 128 00:11:27.440 --> 00:11:32.040 states that have petitioned the Congress to convene a constitutional convention. The Congress 129 00:11:32.040 --> 00:11:38.320 just has to pull the trigger. It's up to their political discretion. So if they wanted to, 130 00:11:38.320 --> 00:11:43.760 we could have a constitutional convention for a balanced budget amendment next week, 131 00:11:43.760 --> 00:11:46.720 but it's not going to happen for political reasons. 132 00:11:46.720 --> 00:11:51.800 Dating back deep into the 19th century, there are literally hundreds of outstanding applications 133 00:11:51.800 --> 00:11:56.240 for Constitutional Amendment Conventions, as I mentioned, there are over 300. So they 134 00:11:56.240 --> 00:12:02.440 can, with those 300 outstanding petitions, they can convene a convention and restrict 135 00:12:02.440 --> 00:12:09.200 the convention to a balanced budget amendment. The time lapse vitality standards set forth 136 00:12:09.200 --> 00:12:14.840 in Coleman v. Miller makes those outstanding applications null and void. This includes 137 00:12:14.840 --> 00:12:19.520 the over 100 petitions that have been submitted by the states to convene a constitutional 138 00:12:19.520 --> 00:12:21.800 for Balance Budget Amendment Convention. 139 00:12:21.800 --> 00:12:25.760 Well in excess of the 34 states there currently 140 00:12:25.760 --> 00:12:27.400 that's required by Article 5. 141 00:12:30.000 --> 00:12:33.840 Let me move on over to the statutory response to this. 142 00:12:33.840 --> 00:12:35.440 In other words, the Congress, 143 00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:37.920 we have to depend upon the Congress. 144 00:12:37.920 --> 00:12:40.280 Now, I have an answer to that. 145 00:12:40.280 --> 00:12:41.880 If the Congress won't act responsibly, 146 00:12:41.880 --> 00:12:43.160 the states are still sovereign, 147 00:12:43.160 --> 00:12:44.800 and if a state doesn't like the crisis, 148 00:12:44.800 --> 00:12:47.000 the impending imminent crisis, 149 00:12:47.000 --> 00:12:55.000 and they could resort to another constitutional remedy and that's secession, but that's a separate paper and a separate issue. 150 00:12:55.000 --> 00:13:05.000 Under the status, this, the lack of an Article 5 Convention President became an issue in the wake of the US Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sin, 151 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:11.000 that was the sister decision of Baker v. Carr, the malapportionment cases. 152 00:13:11.000 --> 00:13:16.000 Soon after Reynolds, 32 states applied for a constitutional amendment convention. 153 00:13:16.000 --> 00:13:29.000 The proposed amendment for the convention to address would have permitted the states to apportion one of its legislative chambers on a standard other than population, as was prior to Reynolds v. Sin, 1964. 154 00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:43.000 As explained by Senator Irvin, the proposed legislation that he introduced, Irvin and Representative Tuck from Virginia, they were going to give the statutory framework in which the Congress would act. 155 00:13:43.000 --> 00:13:46.440 This is what Senator Ervin stated. 156 00:13:46.440 --> 00:14:03.160 Most distressing of all was the apparent readiness of everyone to concede that any convention, once convened, would be unlimited in the scope of its authority and empowered to run rampant over the Constitution, proposing any amendment or amendments that happened to strike its fancy. 157 00:14:03.160 --> 00:14:09.520 So he's dealing to this political backlash of those who didn't want to convene a convention 158 00:14:09.520 --> 00:14:15.040 because they wanted to move the country more and more towards this notion of democracy 159 00:14:15.040 --> 00:14:19.320 based not upon geography but based upon sheer numbers. 160 00:14:19.320 --> 00:14:23.840 As Senator Irvin correctly pointed out, nothing could be farther from the truth and quote, 161 00:14:23.840 --> 00:14:29.160 that interpretation is supported by neither logic nor constitutional history. 162 00:14:29.160 --> 00:14:37.160 In 1968, Senator Ervin drafted a bill titled the Federal Constitution Convention Amendment Act. 163 00:14:37.160 --> 00:14:45.160 Its purpose was to provide procedures for calling the Constitutional Conventions for proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States 164 00:14:45.160 --> 00:14:51.160 on application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states pursuant to Article 5 of the Constitution. 165 00:14:51.160 --> 00:14:55.160 The Act was subjected to numerous committee hearings and markups. 166 00:14:55.160 --> 00:15:00.640 Although drafted in the late 1960s, it covers all contingencies and should serve as a model 167 00:15:00.640 --> 00:15:04.820 for a balanced budget constitutional amendment convention in 2012. 168 00:15:04.820 --> 00:15:09.680 It is important to keep in mind that an Article 5 constitutional amendment convention has not 169 00:15:09.680 --> 00:15:14.400 been invoked and therefore neither historic precedent nor a requisite statutory enabling 170 00:15:14.400 --> 00:15:16.840 legislation has been passed. 171 00:15:16.840 --> 00:15:22.000 Nevertheless, thanks to the heroic efforts of Senator Ervin, the blueprint for moving 172 00:15:22.000 --> 00:15:26.640 Moving forward has been drawn and should be utilized. In other words, we have the proposed 173 00:15:26.640 --> 00:15:33.640 resolution from the Senator from North Carolina. We have to get it passed by the Congress. 174 00:15:33.640 --> 00:15:38.840 It fleshed out all the ambiguities of a yet untried constitutional remedy to an imminent 175 00:15:38.840 --> 00:15:47.840 public policy crisis, in this case, the impending crisis stemming from the national debt. It 176 00:15:47.840 --> 00:15:52.920 It provides a framework for moving forward and thereby abating the primary concern surrounding 177 00:15:52.920 --> 00:15:57.280 the Constitutional Amendment Convention that it would be a constitutional nightmare. 178 00:15:57.280 --> 00:16:02.520 In other words, you get the people together, you open up Pandora's box of rewriting the 179 00:16:02.520 --> 00:16:04.240 entire Constitution. 180 00:16:04.240 --> 00:16:05.800 This scares people. 181 00:16:05.800 --> 00:16:11.480 It makes them afraid of exercising their Article 5 prerogatives. 182 00:16:11.480 --> 00:16:16.140 The argument that an Article 5 Constitutional Amendment Convention would be open-ended and 183 00:16:16.140 --> 00:16:21.860 Result in a Constitutional Nightmare is a red herring for two reasons. First, the parameters 184 00:16:21.860 --> 00:16:27.260 for what a constitutional amendment convention can and cannot do are predetermined by the 185 00:16:27.260 --> 00:16:33.780 Congress, by Senator Irvin's legislation. And second, the status quo is tantamount to 186 00:16:33.780 --> 00:16:40.960 a constitutional crisis as the U.S. government's unwillingness, or more precisely, incapacity 187 00:16:40.960 --> 00:16:46.160 The control spending jeopardizes constitutional property rights. 188 00:16:46.160 --> 00:16:50.320 Regarding constitutional property rights, consider the normative perspectives of a prominent 189 00:16:50.320 --> 00:16:55.720 frame of the Constitution with that of a prominent liberal on the U.S. Supreme Court. 190 00:16:55.720 --> 00:17:00.000 The U.S. Constitution's firewalls designed to protect private property have been overrun 191 00:17:00.000 --> 00:17:06.280 by the political process utilized to transfer wealth from the producers of prosperity to 192 00:17:06.280 --> 00:17:09.240 the consumers of government pork. 193 00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:14.720 The transfer involves not merely revenues on hand, but future revenues necessarily committed 194 00:17:14.720 --> 00:17:18.600 to repayment on the national debt. 195 00:17:18.600 --> 00:17:23.960 Contrast Madison's admonition in Federalist Number 10 that the first object of government 196 00:17:23.960 --> 00:17:27.020 is the protection of private property. 197 00:17:27.020 --> 00:17:31.280 The first responsibility of government is to protect private property. 198 00:17:31.280 --> 00:17:35.720 With U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brennan's that, quote, the government's interest in 199 00:17:35.720 --> 00:17:42.480 and Conserving Fiscal and Administrative Resources is outweighed by welfare recipients' property 200 00:17:42.480 --> 00:17:48.180 interests inherent in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. 201 00:17:48.180 --> 00:17:52.400 And this deals from administrative case law and some cases that the Supreme Court decided 202 00:17:52.400 --> 00:17:54.160 in the 1970s. 203 00:17:54.160 --> 00:18:03.880 In other words, fiscal responsibility is outweighed by welfare recipients' property interests 204 00:18:03.880 --> 00:18:10.520 Inherent in the 5th and 14th Amendments, this is what he wrote, from its founding, 205 00:18:10.520 --> 00:18:17.080 this is Justice Brennan, from its founding, the nation's basic commitment has been to foster the 206 00:18:17.080 --> 00:18:25.000 dignity and well-being of all persons within its borders. No state's rights, no state sovereignty, 207 00:18:25.000 --> 00:18:30.120 no state prerogatives in protecting private property. The national government is responsible 208 00:18:30.120 --> 00:18:34.440 for the Dignity and Well-being of All Persons within the United States. 209 00:18:35.560 --> 00:18:40.920 He continues, We have come to recognize that forces not within the control of the poor 210 00:18:40.920 --> 00:18:47.080 contribute to their poverty. This perception against the background of our traditions has 211 00:18:47.080 --> 00:18:51.960 significantly influenced the development of the contemporary public assistance system. 212 00:18:53.080 --> 00:18:59.640 Welfare, by meeting the basic demands of subsistence, can bring within the reach of the poor 213 00:18:59.640 --> 00:19:05.800 the same opportunities that are available to others. Whereas Madison contended, 214 00:19:06.840 --> 00:19:12.360 the diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate is not less an 215 00:19:12.360 --> 00:19:18.360 inseparable obstacle to a uniformity of interest. The protection of these faculties, once again, 216 00:19:18.360 --> 00:19:24.120 is the first object of government. The protection of the different and unequal faculties of acquiring 217 00:19:24.120 --> 00:19:29.880 of Property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results. 218 00:19:29.880 --> 00:19:34.400 And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors ensues 219 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:39.360 a division of society into different interests and parties. 220 00:19:39.360 --> 00:19:46.120 Now if according to Madison, property rights originate in men's diverse faculties, the 221 00:19:46.120 --> 00:19:50.680 protection of this diversity is the first object of government, where does Justice Brennan 222 00:19:50.680 --> 00:19:56.840 can get his notion that the national government has the constitutional authority to, quote, 223 00:19:56.840 --> 00:20:02.880 bring within the reach of the poor the same opportunities that are available to others, 224 00:20:02.880 --> 00:20:03.880 end of quote. 225 00:20:03.880 --> 00:20:10.560 Now, the reason I'm mentioning this is that the political class is opposed to a constitutional 226 00:20:10.560 --> 00:20:14.720 convention for a balanced budget amendment for two reasons. 227 00:20:14.720 --> 00:20:18.860 First of all, they know without convening a constitutional convention, you'll never 228 00:20:18.860 --> 00:20:24.140 have fiscal responsibility. It's secondly that there's this responsibility for the 229 00:20:24.140 --> 00:20:31.060 national government to accumulate as much property and wealth as possible in order to 230 00:20:31.060 --> 00:20:40.060 redistribute it. Now I think I'm out of time, but I have a couple more when I am out of 231 00:20:40.060 --> 00:20:51.420 So, but I do, I have the bill that Senator Irvin introduced, and that's, unfortunately, 232 00:20:51.420 --> 00:20:57.300 we have to rely upon the Congress to convene a constitutional convention, not for constitutional 233 00:20:57.300 --> 00:21:02.060 reasons, but for political reasons, to allay the fears that it would result in an open-ended 234 00:21:02.060 --> 00:21:03.060 convention. 235 00:21:03.060 --> 00:21:03.580 Thank you very much.