A president can put America first for one administration, maybe. But executive orders do not equal legislation.
Republicans who are now the majority party are not ready to lead, nor ready to keep the promises made to elect them in the first place.
How do we put America's first-principles first—for generations?
The answer is Article V of the U.S. Constitution and calling a Convention of States.
Politics has formed an ocean-sized wedge between the people, which halts the open flow of ideas and results that the common citizen seeks from elected officials on Capitol Hill. We the people want solutions, while They the members of Congress want to get re-elected.
Article V of the Constitution gives the states the authority to step in and fix the structural issues at the federal level through the amendment process.
What we did not learn in elementary school was that Article V gives two distinct ways to propose amendments to the Constitution. One way is by Congress proposing amendments (the only way it has been done), and the second way is for the states to get together at a convention to propose amendments.
In both cases, it takes three-fourths of the states to ratify any amendment.
What a brilliant little emergency button America's Framers included in this document — which is, by the way, the longest serving constitution of any nation in the history of the world.
Understand, Convention of States supporters are not calling for writing an entirely new Constitution.
The transparent concept of Article V is this: we can use the Constitution to save the republic. That means we can keep our basic liberties and rights intact, while convening and proposing solutions in the form of amendments that benefit citizens and the nation.
It is not our Constitution that is not working. It is our federal system, which has been corrupted by an accumulation of power in D.C.
The federal government works only when it is confined into its tiny, constitutional box of limited and defined responsibilities, which is how a self-governing republic is supposed to work.
History and learned legal minds have spent decades studying precedent and the previous conventions that our nation and states have held since our nation's founding. The evidence is there.
Robert Natelson, the Independence Institute's senior fellow in constitutional jurisprudence and the head of the Institute's Article V Information Center, has written extensively on how we know that we can trust the Constitution's Convention for Proposing Amendments.
Natelson is the premier scholar in the nation on Article V. We know how conventions work and how rules work.
I am one of more than 2 million volunteers with the Convention of States Project, and the application currently working its way through the North Dakota Senate is not something to be feared. Instead, it should be revered as the best way to return to self-governance and the rule of law.
It is time to get back to self-governance, in which the people rule as sovereigns and are not subject to the political whims of whichever party is the majority in Washington.
The power was intended to remain closer to the people in the states. And Article V is the tool to let the states redirect power back to that source, where it belongs.
Neuharth is a banking technologist, project manager and entrepreneur in Fargo, North Dakota.
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