The Congressional Research Service (CRS), known as “Congress’s think tank”, has recently sent two reports concerning the Article V Convention to their chief audience-members of Congress and their staff.

Entitled, “The Article V Convention for Proposing Constitutional Amendments: Historical Perspectives for Congress (July 10, 2012) and Contemporary Issues for Congress (July 9, 2012),” the confidential reports were made available on the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Governmental Secrecy webpage.

The Article V Convention (AVC) is a method to amend the constitution by bypassing Congress-an action more and more Americans are prone to support as confidence in the Federal government has plummeted to all-time lows.

Congress has repeatedly been lambasted by abysmal approval ratings, but a record-low 10% was recorded by Gallop in early 2012-with a whopping “86% of Americans disapproving of our Federal legislature’s performance.”

People are waking up to the fact that the well-traveled road of electoral and party politics is where good ideas go to die, and consequently, more voters are choosing to self-identify as independents.

A recent Rasmussen poll from late June 2012 found that 53% of likely U.S. voters say that, “neither party in Congress is the party of the American people”-an all time-high.

Occupied Tea Partying

The compound effects of this overwhelming dissatisfaction with Congress has contributed to the birth of contrarian and anti-establishment movements such as the Tea Party in 2009, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Although the Occupy Wall Street movement has largely steered clear from traditional electoral politics-in many respects, both the Tea Party and Occupy movements have either been marginalized or made subservient to the interests of the status quo.

To date, neither the Tea Party nor the Occupy movements have succeeded in coercing substantive changes in the way the Federal government conducts the business of the people.

Sadly, Washington is still home to the “best democracy money can buy.”

Enter the AVC

Time after time, traditional efforts toward political action have been co-opted, stymied or blocked, and organizations like the Friends of the Article V Convention (FOAVC) advocate for a new front to be opened, where new possibilities and real hope for change can flourish.

The frustrations born from a lack of representation in Congress have led activists from across the political spectrum to pursue untried measures, namely, the Article V Convention which bypasses corrupt Federal political processes.

“FOAVC states on its website, “Are you aware that we are being denied our constitutional right to an Article V Convention to propose amendments, despite a whopping 400+ (or more) Article V applications from the state legislatures of 49 of all 50 states? Only 34 are required. So why has Congress ignored the Constitution?”

FOAVC’s position is that not only has the requirement been met to trigger the Article V Convention as early as 1911, but that Congress has cynically disregarded their constitutional duty to call the convention in favor of protecting a de facto monopoly power over the amendatory function. This puts members of Congress in a legal quandary as they’ve all sworn an oath to “support and defend” the U.S. Constitution, and yet-if FOAVC’s position is correct-have brazenly ignored the direct and simple command of Article V, thereby violating their oaths of office, a felony criminal offense.

Joel Hirschhorn of FOAVC stated, “…Congress never wanted to share the constitutional power to propose constitutional amendments. The public should know that the reason this part of the Constitution has never been used is not because of lack of interest by the states or of citizens, but because of Congress.”

The growing support and awareness of Article V has prompted the Congressional Research Service to generate two white papers on the implications of this untapped resource being utilized.

“The author of the reports, Thomas H. Neale states, “…the evidence of the founder’s actions at the 1787 Constitutional Convention suggests that they intended the Article V Convention as a “way around” a Congress unwilling to consider an amendment or amendments that enjoyed broad support.”

To wit, the Founders and Framers placed the convention method in the heart of the U.S. Constitution to provide the people with a means to exercise their right to “alter or abolish” when the Washington establishment has shown itself to be largely ineffective, tone deaf and unresponsive to needs of the people and nation.

Neale credits the rise of social media and information technology with creating a political environment where the speedy emergence of a movement toward an Article V Convention could become a very real possibility.

Popular ideas such as–

•Balanced budget amendment

•Repealing the legal doctrine of corporate personhood

•Securing the vote by providing open-source and independent verification of ballot results

•Campaign finance laws with teeth / public financing of campaigns

— have all been given lip service by the powers that be, but no real movement has occurred to pass these common-sense ideas into law. Amendment ideas with broad support could be visited at a convention, bringing the nation into an empowering dialog and debate-but these amendment proposals would never become law unless they’ve succeeded at garnering significant bi-partisan support from the various state legislatures (see Article V Primer below). This requirement within Article V for amendments to have broad political support absolutely debunks the oft-repeated canard of a “runaway convention.”

The CRS white papers also point to the fact that Congress or the National Archives have never kept a record of state applications for an AVC, forcing the government to rely on the Friends of the Article V Convention’s independent research of the Congressional Record.

From 2008, FOAVC sponsored its own investigation of the nation’s Congressional Record tallying the hundreds of applications that have been submitted-

“…this organization’s list is evidently the only comprehensive compilation of state applications. Neither Congress, which receives state applications for an Article V Convention, nor the National Archives, which is the custodian of most congressional documents, retains the applications in an organized collection.” ~ Congressional Research Service report on Article V Convention

Hirschhorn, co-founder of FOAVC and a former congressional staffer, commented on the government’s seemingly purposeful negligence, “…that Congress never established a mechanism for assembling state applications for a convention nor passed any law directly on the Article V convention means that Congress intentionally wanted to diminish the importance of the Article V convention option and reduce the likelihood of ever using it… …the new CRS reports sidestep the most crucial issue of all, namely, whether or not a sufficient number of state applications have actually already been submitted and, if so, that Congress has disobeyed the Constitution!”

An Article V Convention Primer

Article V of the constitution provides two methods for amending the U.S. Constitution.

The first is by a vote of two-thirds of both the U.S. House and Senate to pass an amendment, which then needs three-fourths of the states to ratify the amendment into law, thereby affixing it to the supreme law of the land. This process has occurred 27 times in the history of our nation.

The second method is through an Article V Convention, which is called into session when two-thirds of the states have applied for one (a threshold that’s already been met).

The convention debates different ideas and then votes on them. Aspiring amendments that have been successfully passed by the convention then need to follow the same track as the first amendatory method-ratification by three-fourths of the states. This strict requirement prevents any extreme or radical proposals from surviving-the Founders would not have been so shortsighted as to place a self-destruct switch in the center of their masterpiece.

People are out in the streets all over the world. We’re fed up with the status quo, so we chuck our tribal spears–democracy in its most primordial form.

Where the Tea Party angst was co-opted and diverted toward traditional electoral politics–in the form of supporting Republican candidates–the Occupy Wall Street movement is playing the long game, and wisely so.

“We do not support an election campaign for 2012. At all. We have removed election material for Obama, Paul, Warren, Paul, Cain, Paul, Perry, Paul, the green party, Paul, Nader, Paul, and did I mention Paul? The spamming by the Ron Lawl 2012 fan club was getting out of hand. We will continue to remove such material and any call for the Paul 2012 campaign will, at this point, be considered spamming. End of. We’re tired of hearing about it. Main street debates are also largely off topic.” ~ OccupyWallSt.org

Now the problem with bottom-up, non-hierarchical, decentralized, grassroots democracy, is that pretty much, anything goes. So this quasi-top-down dictate from one OWS website, distancing itself from the 2012 election, could be brushed away in a moment if found to be no longer convenient nor useful. Course this “anything goes” aspect could also be considered a virtue and saving grace–certainly a flexible form and model that best replicates the characteristics of the only examples of true sustainability we have, which are natural ecosystems. Fleet of foot and adaptable.

The pier-to-pier, or “peer-to-peer” democracy we see on the internet is a living and evolving example of experimental adaptability mirroring Mother Nature’s capacity to contend with shifting environmental and biological conditions, ergo, maintaining balance within a system.

We would like to see what we see possible within the information universe to be made real in our real universe.

In many ways, this is a simple translation, like having a thought and then acting on it. This is why 2009’s “Twitter Revolution” happened in Iran and why people are out in the streets in Cairo, Wall Street, elsewhere. People see the connections, possibilities, and “own” them within their virtual world, and are now demanding those hopeful possibilities in our real world.

There’s a movement going on–people are waking up.

Of course there are all sorts of geopolitical idiosyncrasies within each unfolding narrative–I definitely understand the mammoth distinction between being peppered sprayed at U.C. Davis versus the tragic loss of life, the martyrs for democracy in Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, etc. One is an outrage–the other, an abomination.  

But people who refuse, or are incapable, to see the connections between the Tea Party, Occupy Movements, protests in Europe and Middle East, just don’t “get it”. But we do.

Take the ‘R’ out of Revolution and Evolve!

I tried to unpack what a sustainable socio-economic system (SSES) would look like back in 2004 for my Global Peace Solution television broadcast for the Middle East and Iranian Diaspora.

“A sustainable socio-economic system is a system that doesn’t prey upon weakness or promote consumer vulnerability, and shifts corporate focus away from profiting off “maximized” exploitation, and begins to prioritize the maintenance of an evolving economic adaptability: a sustainable system serving the long term interests of it participants and the world we live in.”

I also referred to this as governance made of life and for all life–if you will, an addendum to “by, for, and of the people”. We are seeing these kinds of evolutionary ideas expressed within the global movement, within OWS, the seeds are being planted and are bearing fruit right now–making history and transforming our world.

One idea that I think is perfectly tailored for the moment, is the Article V Convention method of altering or abolishing government that no longer works for the people. Certainly, the unholy tryst twist Washington and Wall Street is one of the first log jams that needs to be untangled “Gordian knot” stylie. In this case, an Article V Convention is akin to Alexander the Great’s sword.

It’s a remedy embedded in the simple direct language of the constitution–and the solution has the people staging an intervention, allowing for significant change to occur outside of Washington and removed from traditional electoral corruption; a strategy precisely in tune and consonant with the OWS worldview. A new way, that opens a new front.

Many dismiss the notion of a convention because they don’t understand it, or they think it will be just as corrupt as what we currently suffer in Washington and Wall Street.

But the fact remains: what we have now is corrupt, and that’s why we need to open new arenas through which our case for transformation can be heard. The old “change we can believe in” thing (i.e. electoral politics) is not working for the people any more–and many veterans within our sacred social change movement will readily concede that the mainstream political parties is where movements go to die, co-opted and compromised into irrelevance.  

The Founders actually did envision the current state of the nation. They could foresee an intractable situation befalling the Republic in which undue influence and corruption would become so entrenched into our political institutions, that elections–or any actions taken by the Federal Government–would be incapable of addressing America’s biggest problems. Sound familiar?

What the designers of our constitution foresaw was the distinct possibility that the same kind of centralized tyrannical power they had just opposed and defeated (the British Crown and Parliament) could potentially materialize over time in the new nation. They unanimously agreed to incorporate a switch that could be flipped in the future to convene a group of citizen delegates charged with addressing what was broken.

That switch is called an “Article V Convention”, and contrary to popular myth, it is not a self-destruct button. An Article V Convention allows citizen delegates to produce a roster of ideas for each state to consider to approve as a US Constitutional Amendment. There are sufficient protections built-in to prevent any kooky, radically partisan, or extreme ideas from surviving the two-step nomination and ratification process. If you believe in the brilliance of the Founders, you cannot presume to think that they would have been so idiotic as to put a poison pill right in the heart of the constitution.

The convention clause was seen by the Framers as a necessary check-and-balance, and has the potential to reboot the Federal laptop that’s been locked-up and frozen for years. While banging on the keys may seem like it’s working (elections), if you really want to get something done, Article V is the reset switch.

Things are happening, people are waking up to the fact that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party should dust off an old-but-never-used constitutional remedy, an Article V Convention. If you’re in search of truly transpartisan solutions, and are not satisfied with electoral politics, check out this time-capsule gift from the Founders: the amendatory convention enshrined in Article V, an idea whose time has come–and whose design was scrupulously intended for present circumstance.