Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Conservative Group Aims to Rewrite the Constitution Through a Constitutional Convention
The right-wing is looking to undo our Constitution by writing a new one. (Kim Davies)
January 4, 2021
By Bill Berkowitz
Convention of States Action has been working for years to win enough states with majority Republican legislatures to convene a constitutional convention, through the use of Article V of the Constitution. As 2022 unfolds, conservative activists are creeping ever closer to that goal.
What is the potential impact of a conservative led Constitutional Convention? According to reporting by The Center for Media And Democracy’s Alex Kotch, there are several issues at stake, including “rewrite[ing] the U.S. Constitution to ‘balance the budget,’ limit the powers of the federal government, and enact term limits on political office holders.” If you think that COSA’s goals are beyond reach, think about how voting rights and abortion rights are currently hanging by a thread due to the multi-decade work of the Republican Party and conservative activists.
Kotch reported that “Fifteen state legislatures have voted to convene the broad convention [Convention of States Action (COSA), nine states have passed a convention bill in one chamber, and 18 additional states have active legislation regarding a convention, according to COSA.”
“Two-thirds of the states, 34, must pass a convention call for it to occur, and amendments adopted at a convention must be approved by three-quarters of state legislatures to become part of the Constitution.”
Founded by Eric O'Keefe and Mark Meckler, who is a Tea Party organizer and president of COSA, a 501 (c)(4) organization. According to COSA’s website, the project “is first and foremost a movement of grassroots citizens who are fed up with business as usual in D.C. We’re funded by thousands of everyday patriots who have committed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to protecting liberty for future generations.”
However, as CMD’s Kotch reported, the organization is not really driven by grassroots funding: “The parent organization of COSA, Citizens for Self-Governance, gets most of its funding from anonymous donations via donor-advised fund sponsors. From 2012-18, the group received nearly $7.6 million from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, a fund that passes along its clients’ charitable donations to the nonprofits of their choice. Donors also include DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund—right-wing donor-advised fund sponsors used by GOP megadonors such as the Koch and Mercer families—the Armrod Charitable Foundation, Judicial Education Project (now known as The 85 Fund), the Mercer Family Foundation, and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation.”
SourceWatch, a project of The Center for Media and Democracy revealed that COSA’s total revenue has gone from $121,522 in 2014 to $6,908,918 in 2019.
Meckler, a COSA founder, is a controversial figure. SourceWatch reported that “In a June 2020 edition of his video blog The BattleCry with Mark Meckler, Meckler said that ‘Black Lives Matter as an organization is evil. It is anti-American, it is anti-nuclear family; they say this on their website. It is pro-transgender- it's a mental illness by the way, you can't be pro-mental illness it's a terrible thing.’"
Meckler also told his viewers in July of 2020 that "I'm sick of these thugs and these hooligans, whatever you want to call them, criminals, radical elements in society, Marxists, whatever you want to call them, running wild in our society, running rampant in our society."
COSA has helped to coordinate protests against COVID-19 lockdowns.
Santorum Comes On Board
During a private workshop at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual States and Nation Policy Summit at a four-star hotel in San Diego, former Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum, who is now a senior advisor to COSA, was optimistic about the future of Republican minority rule.
He told attendees that:
We have a hard time winning presidential elections, as you know, in Pennsylvania, yet we dominate the state legislature and Congress. Why? …All [of Democrats’] votes are concentrated in a very small group of people [in urban areas], and it’s hard to draw legislative districts that they can win because most of their legislative districts are 90 plus percent one party.
Rural voters, even though there are fewer of them…actually have an outsize granted power under this process. And we have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us, but because of the way the concentration of votes has changed in this country, we can actually accomplish things.
Santorum was reiterating a very basic reality: Republicans can control enough state legislatures to guarantee future control over states even though the majority of voters continue to reject their agenda.
Kotch pointed out that “Knowing their views aren’t popular with a majority of Americans, conservative constitutional convention advocates hope to use archaic, anti-democratic standards that empower rural and more traditionally conservative voters to effectively gerrymander the Constitution and cement their minority rule for decades to come.”
The convening of a constitutional convention could expand and consolidate the autocratic power of the Right and usher in an era where hard-won rights of the 20th century including voting rights, reproductive rights, and freedom of speech are scaled back or eliminated.
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