Having witnessed the difficulties and dangers experienced by the first Convention, I would tremble for the result of the second. —James Madison, Father of the Constitution and fourth President of the United States
All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree. —James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention, July 11, 1787
The majority of Americans do not understand that our Representative Republic is under attack and has been for decades. As Ben Franklin said, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Basically, we lost it long ago, but we cannot afford to lose the 1787 Constitution or our liberties will be a thing of the past.
Who is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)? It is a think tank whose members consist of state legislators and corporations who gather together behind closed doors to write legislation for the states. Dark money funds ALEC, especially the Koch Brothers, but more on them in another article. ALEC has long been promoting an Article V Constitutional Convention.
ALEC’s membership is 95% corporate along with 2500 of the 7500 legislators from every state. This is where state legislation originates.
ALEC Founder, Paul Weyrich
The number one mover and shaker of the rightwing Council for National Policy (CNP) was Paul Weyrich, albeit there were others with more money and power, the Coors family, and Planned Parenthood promoter, Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Carnegie Mellon fortune. Scaife has allegedly funded ALEC to the tune of more than $7 million. One must remember that Scaife funded both sides of the aisle and was connected to Rockefeller (Chase Mellon Bank).
The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981by charismatic Baptist, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, Nelson Bunker Hunt and twice tried for murder, Texas oilman, T. Cullen Davis.
Weyrich was the Grand Poohbah of the CNP. He co-founded the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council and was the first president or director of all three. He also once served as advisor to former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin of Chechnyan genocide fame. He wrote about it in an article in the Heritage affiliate, Townhall Magazine.
In 1987, Weyrich wrote an article entitled, “A Conservative’s Lament,” which showed his unabashed yearning for a Parliamentary form of government for America and his strong belief that America needed a shadow government…which is what we seem to have with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Back in 1992, when recently deceased Ross Perot came on the scene, he was gung-ho for a Con-Con. Like Weyrich, he stated emphatically that we needed a parliamentary government and bragged that “his people” could get the remaining states needed for a Con-Con “in their sleep.” Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and fellow patriots stopped it.
ALEC History
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It’s not just a lobby or front group, ALEC is one of the most powerful unelected councils in the country. [Link] Note that unelected councils and task forces, and public-private partnerships, etc. are forms of government used in democratic socialist and communist countries.
ALEC first came into being in 1973 in Chicago as the “Conservative Caucus of State Legislators.” In 1975, with the support of the American Conservative Union, ALEC registered as a federal non-profit agency. Through the corporate-funded Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called “model bills” reach into almost every area of American life and, more often than not, directly benefit huge corporations. In ALEC’s own words, corporations have “a VOICE and a VOTE” on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state, and sometimes in the federal legislature.
The Madison Group, the predecessor to the State Policy Network (SPN), similar to mini Heritage Foundation’s in each state, was “launched by ALEC,” and housed in the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, so says a 1991 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP). The Heartland Institute was/is a member of ALEC. Link The Institute has also functioned as a publisher and promoter of ALEC’s model legislation, including a new Article V Constitutional Convention.
Heartland is funded by the Koch brothers, David and Charles, the former being a member of the globalist Aspen Institute. Remember Aspen Institute’s former Director was none other than Maurice Strong, author and promoter of UN Agenda 21. NCRP also reported that the Madison Group’s annual meeting was, at that time, “sponsored by Heritage Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation,” led by Paul Weyrich.
One has to remember that Heritage Foundation fellow and CFR member, Richard V. Allen drafted NAFTA, and Stuart M. Butler wrote the monograph for Heritage promoting the individual mandate in healthcare.
Corporations Write the Bills
Watch this six-minute video of a backroom ALEC meeting in Georgia.
Corporations hand to state legislators their “wish lists” of legislation to benefit their bottom lines. The membership of ALEC is 98% corporate and the corporate membership is the one that funds almost all of ALEC’s operations. They have bought their way into the process by which corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. ALEC’s legislative leaders are responsible for getting the bills introduced and passed. They introduce and carry the bills in their statehouses as their own brilliant ideas. As an example, the immigration bill, SB1070, was written by ALEC and carried by Russell Pearce, word for word, to Arizona. Private prison corporations had a huge part in ALEC’s crafting of SB1070.
The legislators never disclose that corporations wrote and vetted these bills along with fellow politicians behind closed doors at ALEC meetings. So, everyone who is a member of ALEC is influencing not only state bills, but likely most federal bills as well, written by corporations with vested interests…along with lobbyists and state representatives.
ALEC’s Corporate Donors
ALEC has a huge list of corporate donors and corporate members, and here is a state by state partial list of politicians that are known to be involved in, or previously involved in ALEC. Not all dues-paying members of ALEC are included because ALEC does not post its full list, but the list includes politicians who have been in a leadership role in ALEC, as a member of a task force, or other publicly known role. It also includes politicians who have been featured speakers or who have accepted awards at ALEC meetings.
In the mid-1990s, the Church of Scientology became one of ALEC’s members and underwriters, for the apparent purpose of interacting with state lawmakers on mental health-care issues. Here’s an excerpt from a 1998 fundraising letter written by Bruce Wiseman, the president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, (CCHR) a highly controversial anti-psychiatry front-group of the Church of Scientology. Wiseman writes,
“ALEC is a national organization made up of legislators from every state as well as some federal legislators who meet and draft model legislation for every state. The return for that has been enormous! CCHR has worked its way up the conditions at ALEC and recently got an article published by ALEC in opposition to mandated mental-health parity, which went to key state legislators who deal with health issues in their respective states. In addition, the ALEC membership has opened the door to meeting numerous legislators and other opinion leaders from around the country.”
ALEC exists to maximize the profits of their corporate kings and financiers, especially Koch Industries, Exxon Mobile, PhrMA, Altria, and Pfizer, who pay upwards of $25,000 just to become members.
ALEC and the Article V Convention
ALEC has long promoted an Article V Constitutional Convention using the excuse that we need a Balanced Budget Amendment, the same excuse used in the late 70s and defeated by Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and fellow patriots. If you’ve read Publius Huldah’s articles on same, here and here, then you understand what a terrible danger the BBA actually is to our Constitution.
ALEC even produced a “Resolution for Limitations on Authority of Delegates to a ‘Convention for Proposing Amendments’ (Article V, United States of America Constitution.” ALEC claims this resolution will curtail and eliminate the possibility of a “runaway convention.” The resolution restricts delegates to work only on those amendments authorized in their legislative instructions and calls for the immediate recall of any delegate that works on an unauthorized amendment.” This is total balderdash! Once a Convention is opened, all is fair game!
A 43-page handbook, written by ALEC’s “constitutional scholar,” Robert G. Natelson, entitled: “Proposing Constitutional Amendments by a Convention of the States,” was provided to their mostly-republican members, along with model legislation to carry back to their states. The booklet is full of spins, lies, and misdirection. It claims the states must exercise control as given to them by the founders, that they must move quickly, that state legislatures will have complete control over the process, and will answer to the state legislatures they represent. This is far from the truth. There is no provision in Article V empowering state legislators to choose the delegates to a Constitutional Convention or to “limit” the scope of a Con-Con. There are no rules, no regulations, and certainly no instructions. Link
Historical Precedents
The 1787 Convention set historical precedents that side with a runaway convention. A convention today could propose bad amendments or even a new constitution like the one written over a period of 10 years, at a cost of $25 million, by the Ford Foundation, which eliminates everything after “We The People,” and that includes our God given, unalienable rights. Once a convention is opened, they could force it on the American people by way of creating and utilizing a new mode of ratification.
Wolf-Pac, and the Convention of States Project, (COS) says that can’t happen despite the fact that it did happen when the 1787 Convention met to amend the Articles of Confederation and totally threw them out and started anew. Oh, what those wonderful freedom loving statesmen gave us then, but today, there is not a statesman alive who would be a match for even one of the men in the 1787 convention.
The very reason most often cited by scholars for their opposition to an Article V Convention is because the 1787 Convention set the precedent. There is absolutely no way that a new convention can possibly be controlled, no matter the circumstances or restrictions set down prior to the convention. The intention from the outset of many of its proponents, chief among them James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, was to create a new government rather than fixing the existing one. This is also what exists today, and Madison called them, “violent partisans.”
Left and Right Promote Con-Con
The neo-conservative Trotskyites on the right, Sean Hannity, Michael Farris, Mike Levin, David Barton, Glenn Beck, Tom Coburn, Allen West, Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, CFR memberGrover Norquist, Charles and David Koch who heavily fund ALEC, Gov. John Kasich, former Gov. Mike Huckabee, Tennessee’s Michael Patrick Leahy, Georgetown Professor Randy Barnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano etc. etc. ad nauseam, are all fomenting change to our Constitution through an Article V convention.
George Soros and his Constitution 2020 along with his Open Society Institute and the Center for American Progress are heavily funding a new convention. Groups like the Goldwater Institute’s Nick Dranius and Compact for America, I Am American, the “Move to Amend” coalition, Turk Cenk Uyger’s Wolf Pac, Mark Meckler’s Citizens for Self-Governance, Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig, and others are promoting a new convention. Link
William Furth of “I am American” actually physically pushed Publius Huldah off a stage several years ago in Knoxville, TN, when she tried to explain to the audience the dangers of another convention.
Conclusion
Countless authorities have stated that a Constitutional Convention cannot be controlled. Once a Con-Con is opened, the entire document can be taken down and changed. There are no statesmen today like our founders, and the risk of opening a convention for any reason would result in the destruction of the last threads binding us to a representative Republic.
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© 2018 Kelleigh Nelson – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Kelleigh Nelson: Proverbs133@bellsouth.net
