Be Careful What You Wish For

“Be careful what you wish for.” I’m sure we’ve all heard that warning from time to time, and I think it applies in the circumstance I am about to address.

The have been an inordinate amount of e-mail messages lately calling for a constitutional convention to add a 28th amendment to The United States Constitution. It takes three-quarters of the states, 38 in all, to call for the convention, and there are apparently 35 states that have called for it so far.

In case you live in the dark, the proposed 28th amendment—it doesn’t get capital letters until it becomes law—calls for Congress to only pass laws that apply equally to the senators and representatives in that august body as well as the citizens they seek to impose those laws upon. In other words, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

I don’t pretend to be a scholar when it comes to our constitution. Heck, I admit that I couldn’t rattle off the first ten amendments, known as The Bill of Rights, and I’ll wager that none of you could do it either.

I do know that this isn’t the first instance when there has been a hue and cry for a constitutional convention, but I seem to recall that there was a flaw in the procedure. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I hope you can, but when you convene a constitutional convention, you don’t just open the floor for new amendments; the whole document is open for re-interpretation, revision and repeal.

That means that those of us who are fearful of losing our First Amendment rights to free speech, or our Second Amendment rights to bear arms, or any of the rights in the other 25 amendments are in danger of losing some of those rights in the ensuing convention.

I want you to think about that the next time you get one of those mailings that requests you to petition your state representatives and governors to ratify the state’s demand for a constitutional convention.

We may get a lot more than a 28th amendment, and I don’t think we’ll like it one bit.