The funds were split between Cosa and other influential groups on the right. The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which monitors the constitutional convention movement, estimates that it pulled in $25m (£22m) in 2020, the last year for which figures are known. They are also much better funded than people might think. We are a lot further along than people think.” “We have built the largest grassroots activist army in American history,” Meckler told Bannon, probably hyperbolically.īannon’s other guest on the War Room, Rick Santorum, a former Republican US senator from Pennsylvania who advises Cosa, told Bannon: “This is something that can happen very quickly. The group has also been busy around November’s midterm elections, using its muscle and some $600,000 (£528,252) of its reserves to support candidates amenable to the idea. A convention resolution framed by Cosa has passed so far this year in four states – Wisconsin, Nebraska, West Virginia and South Carolina. His urgency is underlined by how active the movement has become. “Our goal is not to scare people, but to alert them that there is a movement on the far right that is quietly getting itself to a point where it will be almost impossible to stop a convention being called,” he said. It will prevent the will of ‘we the people’ being heard.”įeingold has co-authored with Peter Prindiville of the Stanford constitutional law center The Constitution in Jeopardy, a new book that sounds the alarm on the states-based convention movement. Russ Feingold, a former Democratic US senator from Wisconsin, told the Guardian that “they want to rewrite the constitution in a fundamental way that is not just conservative, it is minoritarian. The state-based model for rewriting the US constitution is perhaps the most audacious attempt yet by hard-right Republicans to secure what amounts to conservative minority rule in which a minority of lawmakers representing less-populated rural states dictate terms to the majority of Americans. A bar chart of party control of state legislatures since 1978. It gives state legislatures the power to call a constitutional convention of their own, should two-thirds of all 50 states agree.Ī bar chart of party control of state legislatures since 1978. Meckler, working alongside other powerful interest groups and wealthy rightwing megadonors, is gunning for Article V’s second route – one that has never been tried before. In practice, all 27 amendments that have been added over the past 244 years have come through the first route – a Congress-led process whereby two-thirds of both the US House and Senate have to approve changes followed by ratification by three-quarters of the states. Now the plan is to take that dominance nationwide.Īrticle V of the constitution lays out two distinct ways in which America’s core document, ratified in 1788, can be revised.

Over the past 12 years, since the eruption of the Tea Party, Republicans have extended their grip to more than half of the states in the country, imposing an increasingly far-right agenda on the heartlands. Were a convention achieved, it would mark the zenith of conservative state power in American politics. By cementing the policies into the US constitution, they would become largely immune to electoral challenge. The “structural fix” involves Republican state legislatures pushing conservative amendments to America’s foundational document. “The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains.

Meckler went on to divulge the anti-democratic nature of the state convention movement when he said a main aim was to prevent progressive policies being advanced through presidential elections.

“We need to say constitutionally, ‘No, the federal government cannot be involved in education, or healthcare, or energy, or the environment’,” he said. Mark Meckler, a founder of the Tea Party who now leads one of the largest groups advocating for the tactic, the Convention of States Action (Cosa), spelled out some of the prime objectives on Bannon’s show. Former White House strategist Steve Bannon is looking to take a movement to rewrite the US constitution nationwide.

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