 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Community Matters. So we're gonna talk to Vicki Harrison of Common Cause about Article 5. Welcome to the show, Vicki Harrison. It's so nice to have you here. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. I love to talk to folks in Hawaii. And we like to talk to Common Cause. You know, Common Cause is about voting and you're about the Constitution vis-a-vis voting. So we wanna know what's going on with Article 5. There's something happening with Article 5. Can you talk about it? Absolutely. And thank you so much, Jay, for giving me the opportunity to talk to folks about Article 5, which is something that most Americans don't pay much attention to. It's a provision in our Constitution that gives us the opportunity to amend the Constitution. And the first part of Article 5 talks about the amendment process, something that most folks are familiar with because we've done it 27 times in amending our Constitution. The second part of it is something most folks don't know about because the last time we did it is when we wrote our Constitution. And that is an Article 5 convention. And that is how do we... And through this, what we have is 34 states that call for a convention and Congress calls it and the states get together, come up with ideas and then it gets sent back to the states and you need three quarters of the states to ratify that. Now, that sounds simple enough, Jay, but there are way too many unknowns around this process. Who's gonna be in charge? What role do the courts play? I mean, it's literally a couple of sentences in the Constitution and Common Cause while we absolutely support the amendment process which allows us to update our Constitution, we are firmly opposed to a constitutional convention. Why? Because of the unknowns. That's the biggest thing. You know, we have a former board member at Common Cause who said, why would you set your house on fire and then pray the fire department shows up in time? And in fact, our proponents themselves, just this week, I was listening to proponents in Montana and every single one of them who was supporting a constitutional convention had no problem saying, you're right, this is a risky thing. This is a risky thing to do. And the folks who are pushing this are wanting to really rewrite and get rid of a lot of our protections. I mean, things that we take for granted in the Constitution at this point, clean air and water, education for all children in this country, women's rights, LGBTQI rights, there are so many rights that are at risk. And those questions, as I mentioned, Jay, surrounding this, not only, what does anybody do? Let's say we have a convention called, does that mean that each state gets one vote? Well, if that's the case, then the smallest 26 Republican states that represent 34% of our country's population could rewrite the Constitution. That's not a democratic process. It leaves the people out. That's pretty scary. Who resolves the problems that come up in what you describe as a chaos? That, Jay, is the next question. We don't know. There's no provisions in Article 5 that says, if there's a disagreement, Congress steps in, state legislatures step in, courts, we have no idea. There is no, we don't know what the role of anybody else. We also don't know who would be at the convention. Who are these delegates that state legislators are gonna choose? I mean, are they gonna be regular constituents or are they gonna be donors? Are they gonna be corporations? Are they going to be businesses or are they going to be a grocery clerk or are they gonna be a school teacher? And we know that from the beginning of, and what are they gonna consider once they get to a convention? These different proposals say they're gonna just consider this proposal or they have to all say the same thing. Yet other proponents are willing to combine different calls for a convention and say, we call that their fuzzy math. This is our fuzzy math. We are gonna just bring in these other calls because they have something vaguely similar to our language or nothing similar to our language. Have we had a convention before, a federal convention? When we wrote our constitution, that was the last time we had an article five constitutional convention. And that's when we got our constitution. And in fact, they got rid of some of the rules that they themselves had just come up with for that convention. And that is the biggest problem, Jay, because there are no guardrails on what will be discussed. And quite frankly, some of the proposals that have been put forward in an article five, common cause would support if it were an amendment. And in fact, we have one of them that folks on the left have been pushing is for a constitutional convention to overturn Citizens United, which is a great thing to do, common cause. And in fact, Hawaii is the first state in the country to send an amendment call to Congress to say get rid of Citizens United. And since then we've had two dozen states and over 800 cities and counties do the same thing. It's something that common cause has worked in in every state, but we are not willing to open up our constitution because quite frankly, once we get there, campaign finance is not gonna be the one that makes it through. So we've successfully used the ordinary amendment procedure in article five all these years. And I guess the issues you described with the convention don't exist for an ordinary article five amendment, right? They don't. And in fact, Jay, the regular amendment process is all about the American people. These are amendments and ideas that come up from the state legislatures to Congress. And in state legislatures, people have access. We can show up, we can testify, we can reach out to our legislators, we know what's on the agenda, we can write a letter to the editor, we can reach out to our local media, but with a constitutional, and then we can do that all the way up to Congress. But with a constitutional convention, where is it gonna be held? We've got delegates. What does that even mean that are gonna be in charge of this? Will they be legislators or will they be like we just mentioned, donors to legislators? You know, we have a provision in the Hawaii constitution allowing for a constitutional convention as a vote on it every 10 years. We've had one in 1978, but we haven't had one since. And the concerns that people express are pretty much what you're describing. Has it worked? The one in 1978 came up with stuff that elite a lot of people regret because it opens everything up to everything. You don't know if you're gonna have a hijacked convention and a hijacked convention can do terrible damage to your rule of law, your constitutional rights. God knows what. So there's a certain amount of concern among people in Hawaii about having constitutional conventions and it runs a parallel to what you're talking about, those concerns do. And so who is coming up with this? And what is the relationship of the people who are doing this and want this? And those who wanna suppress voting in various states, those who want to throw the baby out with the bath on various constitutional issues. Who are these people? Well, Jay, we've got two campaigns that are the biggest ones to call for a convention. One of them is called the Balance Budget Amendment and they are six states away. They have 28 states that have signed onto this. And the Balance Budget Amendment, this is Alec, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps write laws for corporations and businesses. We've got Carl Rowe, Scott Walker from Michigan, Mr. Let's Kill, Right to Work. The Koch Industries, this is something that they have been pushing with their Balance Budget forever. And Balance Budget Amendment to the average person may not sound like a bad idea. You can say to yourself, well, hey, I balance my checkbook, they should balance their checkbook. The truth is, is governments and businesses don't run that way. And I tell people, if we had a Balance Budget Amendment in this country, it would cripple us tomorrow. And I mean, think about the pandemic and everything we had to do. Think about any catastrophe that happens. So the Balance Budget Amendment folks, they are at 28 states, they need 34, and the other big campaign is Convention of States. And Convention of States, they are also talking about a balance budget and physical responsibility, but they also talk about term limits and they are run by Mark Mechler, is their president, former co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. And then we've also got Tim Dunn, who's a big mega donor from Texas. Rick Santorum, former US Senator from Pennsylvania. And they have been very, very aggressive. We had held them to 15 states for several years. And last year they picked up four states. And their goal is to pick up four more this year and call a convention within the next two years. And so fighting defense for the BBA and the Convention of States, that's our number one priority right now, as well as trying to always rescind calls anywhere we can, which is something that we've done in the last year. We've rescinded all previous calls in both New Jersey and Illinois. How do you rescind a call? You need the same vote that you had when they made the call in the first place? You don't. You just need to get it through the legislature. In most states, it's just a majority plus one. And it usually goes through both chambers. Most states, except for South Carolina, the governor doesn't have anything to do with it. I find that interesting. The new federalism, the governor doesn't have anything to do with it. We've seen that come up before. The other thing is, so if the convention meets and gets through this chaos and comes up with a recommendation, however it does that, if it can do that, then that doesn't mean that the amendment becomes the amendment. It has to go back to the states. And that's in the first part of Article 5 also. What does it say and how would that work? Well, and you're right. I mean, once a convention is called and the delegates get together and come up with their proposals, they have to go back to the states for ratification. And you need three quarters of the states to do that, which it is a high bar. And thank goodness it's a high bar. And so how that process would work would again, there's not a lot of information about it. We have better information on the ratification process than we do on other pieces. But what the assumption is, is that the proposals would go through both chambers or in Nebraska's case, one chamber, and be voted on. And then if three quarters of the states pass that, that would go back to Congress and then we would have those amendments to our constitution. And the folks on the other side who love to call me a fearmonger, because what you just mentioned, Jay, around a runaway convention is one of our biggest concerns because we just don't know. We don't know who will be there and what they will come up with. So we wanna stop it before we even try to get it to the ratification process. And our goal is always to keep it under 34. And like I said, to rescind, rescind, rescind. I'll tell you what bothers me. Just be speaking. You know, we have seen in the Trump years, there are holes in the constitution. There are flaws in it. There are drafting errors in it. And that if you and I could go back to the 18th century, we'd probably draft it. I'm not saying different than substance, but we drafted better. We drafted so it was predictable. It was not vague, it was not ambiguous. Constitution has those problems and we are finding now with people who wanna play with it, that they can find those ambiguities. Well, if you go to a convention and you have a free-for-all and chaos, a couple of things come to my mind. One is something you mentioned before is you could load 27 things into one amendment. And you can have all kinds of stuff in that amendment. Okay, the second thing is you could draft it badly. You could draft it with all kinds of ambiguities and create kind of a legal chaos, either intentionally or even unintentionally. And now you've laid it on the country somehow and we don't know what it means. We only know that it makes a mess. And we know the Supreme Court, at least the way it's constituted right now, is not capable, not interested in fixing it. So what are your thoughts about those problems that would come out of a convention? Those are very real problems, Jay. I mean, it's something that we see in cities and states across the country every single day. We have lawmakers who are not attorneys writing laws. So we end up with unconstitutional laws. And do we really want our constitution to be unconstitutional? Think about that. I mean, we're asking people who may not have any experience to do this, who have no skills to rewrite our constitution. And I often have folks that say, you know, Vicki, we need to update the constitution. It was written all these hundreds of years ago by old white men and we need to update it. And I think, and I say, well, you know, if you think the constitution needs updating, how do you feel about Ted and Marjorie and Lauren rewriting it? They're not old white men, but those are the kind of people that are going to rewrite this constitution. This is the atmosphere right now. And even if you were a proponent and you supported an article five convention, why on earth would you support it right now when we are so polarized as a country? I mean, I've been doing state politics for several decades and the amount of vitriol and awfulness in state houses since about 2013 to 15 is it's on levels of Congress now, Jay. It's not like it used to be where Republicans, Democrats, independents, arguing committee and then went out and had dinner together that night. And you do not see that at all anymore. So, okay, I get so far, I get the idea that the Republicans, especially the right wing Republicans, the GOP's Republican, the MAGA Republicans are behind this movement. And I wanna know if you know whether Trump is behind this movement, what role does he play? Because we know he doesn't read or write very well or follow the rules of law. And I suspect in my heart that he's the one holding the shot on this and so many other things that do not necessarily bear his name. Is he behind this? There are a lot of folks that are working on this, Jay, that have very close ties to the former president. And we see a lot of the same folks that were, did the stop the steal and thought that the last election was not real. We see a lot of those folks, as I mentioned, the same, the Tea Party folks, the Karl Rhoves of this world, some of the former president's advisors working on this. And I just wanna say though, just to jump in that this is quite frankly not really as much of a partisan issue as they would like it to be. We have a lot of Republicans on our side that think this is a terrible idea. I mean, all you have to do is listen to committee hearings in Nebraska and Montana and Idaho and you will hear Republican after Republican legislator standing up and saying, this is a horrible idea. In fact, former Supreme Court Justice Scalia has been quoted saying, this is a terrible idea. Whoa, why would you want to do this? So while we do have the MAGA Republicans and the Alec Koch brother type Republicans who've been pushing this, there's also a lot of other Republicans for very different reasons maybe. I mean, if you listen to the hearings in Nebraska, the last quite frankly decade of hearings there, they don't want their guns taken away. That's why they don't wanna open up the constitution. That's ironic, isn't it? I mean, I just heard it this week, the same argument Jay in Montana. Senator got up and said, you're not taking my guns. I'm not voting for this. So what can common cause do? You describe a movement that's funded, a movement that has a certain amount of, momentum of people who have been doing it for a while, who are dedicated to doing it. However misguided they are, how do you deal with the legislators and for that matter, the base that would like to see a convention and like to have the chaos and the hijack? You know, we work with a lot of great partners who also care about this. And what we do is we talk to our legislators, we give them the data and show them that this is a bad idea. Common cause has members in every single congressional district in this country and we mobilize them and we are doing phone banks and text banks and sending them emails and talking to them as well as our partners to say, let your senator, let your representative know. This is something that could cripple our country and this is not the time, even if you agreed with any of these proposals, this is not the time or the procedure to use. So what we do, Jay, is show up in state houses year after year. And you know, it was tough last year to lose one state to BBA and four to convention of states. That's tough. But at the same time, we stopped over 150 applications. We have over 150 of these, 160 and 70 in some years that are introduced in legislatures every single year and we stop them and we defeat them because we know that protecting our constitution. And I think people are starting to pay attention to this a little bit more because so many of our democratic norms that people have taken for granted for so many years are in question now. Not only thanks to the former president, but thanks to many decisions made during the pandemic that restricted access to government. Yeah, that's a great concern. You guys have reported that. So one thing is that, what can I do? You know, a legislator, he can do something or she. Common cause can do something as you have described, but what can I do? Who do I write to? Who do I support? I know I support common cause. That's a given. Well, I think what you do, Jay, is you write to your local media so you can get your voice out there. You put together a panel at your church or your community center. We know, Jay, that people are moved on any issue when they hear about it from a friend or family member. You as a friend or family member have more power than any other trusted messenger on these issues. And these are wonky issues that so many other people are trying to put out fires left and right. But like I mentioned, I mean, we've got, there's a letter up on our website that has over 250 organizations signing on in support of defeating a constitutional convention. So I can assure your watchers that if they look at that list, they'll find somebody they know on there. And they will know that whether it's AFSCME or Planned Parenthood or whomever that we have partners that are doing what they can. So that's what folks can do is talk to your friends, your neighbors, put together a forum, reach out. There's lots of other organizations who would be happy to have a conversation about this and show up at the legislature and call your senator, call your representative and say, this is not worth it. We don't want this in Hawaii. As we say in Hawaii, it's not Pono. It's not Pono, exactly, it's not. And I stopped myself from using Hawaiian phrases, okay, because I'm not Hawaiian. So, you know, over the past, over my lifetime anyway, I've seen the growth of complacency here in Hawaii. We have low voted turnout and other states too, I'm sure you know, low voted turnout. And we have complacency about government because for some reason, for many reasons, you know, people have lost confidence in government and they are, you know, we all live in a complex world with complex issues in front of government. And we find that some of the representatives that we have elected are not worth it and make mistakes or worse when you get involved in corruption. So we turn our backs on government. We turn our backs on the social mesh that keeps us together as a country and that has been exacerbated in the years of the former president. He whose name shall not be mentioned, that one. And so I'm concerned about complacency. The other thing I'm concerned about and I want to get your view of this is that people don't realize that if you let those who wish to undermine the constitution in whatever way, including this convention gambit that you described, that we will lose our civil rights. And it's not so simple as having the same life tomorrow as you have today. Your quality of life in terms of your civil rights and everything else, everything else will change if the constitution is undermined. I don't think the complacent people in the country understand the connection between the conversation you and I are having and the things that come and cause support and protects us from and their daily lives. Can you talk about that? Absolutely, and you're right. And that's a great way to close us out, Jay, because that is what is at stake, whether it's our voting rights or any other rights, a right to education, right to clean air and water. It's all up for grabs. They've literally put out in their literature we want to get rid of the Department of Education. We want to get rid of Social Security. We want to get rid of Medicare. I mean, there is just a vast list of anything that you care about is on the chopping block. Any democratic norm you've ever assumed in this country is on the chopping block. Why do these people who are supporting a convention like this, why do they not realize what you're saying? Do they not realize that they also will be affected, that their civil rights personally will be affected, that their relationship with government will be affected? And yet they still come together and support things that are absolutely anti-norm, anti-constitutional, don't they know? They do, and they literally say it in every committee hearing and every floor vote, we know this is risky, but it's worth it. What is it worth? What do they hope to achieve in the larger comprehensive sense by taking that risk? It's very frightening, Jay, and I wish I had an answer for why on earth they would think this was a good idea. Let me ask you the Charles Dickens question, the question of Christmas future. Suppose they succeed, suppose they have a crazy convention with all kinds of loaded bills, multiple compound complex bills that are all directed at undermining the constitution and advancing bizarre initiatives that they have been supporting and advocating for for the past at least 10 years. Suppose they win, suppose they win and get a convention, suppose at the convention they make these recommendations, suppose they win and get three quarters votes of the states and pass crazy amendments. What happens to our country? I don't think we have a country at that point, Jay. I think that our 250 year experiment is over with at that point. I think that I don't see how our country survives as a democracy if we got our entire constitution that created this country. And so I just don't see how we have a country if they rewrite our constitution. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be. Never been higher. Yeah, and if these guys are not coming in the windows, they're coming in the walls. It's a multiple attack in our constitution. It's not just what you saw during the Trump administration, the lawlessness of it, it carries on. It goes forward. It's not going away. And let me say, I really appreciate your work on this, Vicki, and I appreciate the work of Common Cause on it. You are protecting us from that awful result. Well, thank you so much for having me, Jay, and for covering this issue, because it's really important and folks think that this is just something that's happening in red states and it's not. I can assure you they are there in Hawaii right now, lobbying legislators to pass a convention. You know, it's so interesting. I left clothes with that. You know, up till now we've had this idyllic, wonderful, you know, egalitarian society in Hawaii and making the right choices, being liberal and tolerant and diverse. And now all of a sudden we find among us people who come from the mainland, who are by the mainland and they're here. They're vipers and they are trying to do the same thing in Hawaii that they are doing in these other states to describe it. I find that remarkable. And I think we ought to rise up and ask them to go away. The problem is that they're here. They're there and that's why we have to be there too. Yeah, Vicki Harrison, Common Cause. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. It was wonderful. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.