Voter anger fuels support for “Repeal Amendment”

Georgetown Law School professor Randy Barnett, a principal author of the “Repeal Amendment”, likewise believes that the support the amendment has received can be linked to this growing sense of mistrust of the federal government.

“They believe the federal government is out of control,” Barnett said.

Rasmussen compares the current level of angst with what existed prior to the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement   ̶   all of which fundamentally altered America’s direction.

“The overwhelming call to put constraints on the government again is going to continue,” Rasmussen said. “One of the reasons for this frustration is that it is almost impossible to get a constitutional amendment through that would place limits on the government.”

He continued, “Anything that requires a constitutional amendment has to go through Congress, and Congress has no desire to give up on their own power.”

The “Repeal Amendment” likely will suffer the fate of countless other constitutional amendments, such as the School Prayer Amendment, that conservatives have proposed over the past few decades, Rasmussen said.

Nonetheless, Barnett remains optimistic about its potential for passage because the amendment would empower state legislators to check unpopular congressional actions and because it would empower the people to petition their legislators to check federal power.

“Most constitutional amendments don’t go very far because you have to rely on the states to ratify them, and the state legislators generally aren’t interested in them,” Barnett said. “But state legislators have a direct interest in this; they have a direct interest in protecting their own operations from the federal government.”

The amendment’s ability to empower the states to defend their interests from the federal government accounts for the rapid growth of support for it among state legislators nationwide, Barnett said.

Barnett also hopes the new members of Congress will back the amendment because it will not impinge on the budget or existing entitlements.

“There are a lot of Democrats up for election in ’12, and this is a bit like the extension of the Bush tax cuts in that it is going to go to the House then it is going to go to the Senate, and we’ll see if the senators who are up for election in ‘12 are going to vote with that in mind,” he said.  “It is possible they will go forward with it.”

Organizers hope to bypass the usual route of having two-thirds of both houses of Congress propose the amendment by getting 33 state legislatures to petition Congress to call a constitutional convention that would propose the amendment for ratification — something that has not been done since the Constitution was ratified. Thirty-eight states would have to ratify the “Repeal Amendment” under either scenario for it to become part of the Constitution.