FINAL WARNING: Ready to Spring the Trap
marketplace we are entering. There is a better way,” The “better way”
he suggested, seemed to be an end-run around the Constitution;
because the COS literature indicated their interest in passing
Constitutional amendments. He indicated his high expectations for
what the meeting could accomplish:“Congress tried to limit the convention’s authority by stating it
would meet ‘for the sole and express purpose of revising the
Articles of Confederation ... As we all know, the delegates to the
great Constitutional Convention in 1787 in Philadelphia did much
more than that. They threw out the Articles of Confederation and
drafted a new constitution.”Though Article V of the Constitution indicates that two-thirds of the
States must vote for a constitutional convention before Congress
could call one, the COS was planning to use the same method the
delegates did at the Annapolis convention in 1786. Within ten years,
the Constitution that was originally drafted on June 12, 1776 (and fully
ratified by 1781), was no longer able to meet the needs of a growing
nation. The delegates of Virginia, New York, Delaware, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania, meeting in Annapolis were charged with the task of
amending the Articles of Confederation, and were to meet in
Philadelphia “for the sole and express purpose of revising” them. The
need for a stronger central government was expressed, one that didn’t
limit States rights. However, upon meeting in Philadelphia in May,
1787, they locked all the doors, and posted armed guards; and even
closed all the windows, so they could deliberate in secret while they
actually set up a new national government. Neither the Congress or the
people could stop them. Their work was finished on September 17,
1787 (and was fully ratified on May 29, 1790), and the Constitution of
the United States was born, and is still in existence today.Many people were worried about this Conference of States, because
nobody was really sure what could happen. Charles Duke, the
Republican state senator from Colorado, said that the COS would be
the “edge of the sword that knocks the head off the Constitution.”Case law mandates that members of a constitutional convention must
be directly elected by the people, so they can act as their
representatives to exercise the sovereign power of the state. Each