There’s a fundamental problem in Washington, according to Tom Coburn.
The American people keep sending representatives to the nation’s capital thinking they can fix the country’s problems, but instead those elected representatives become part of Washington. They seek not to fix America’s problems but simply to hold onto power, thereby breaching the trust of the people who sent them there.
Coburn witnessed the problem firsthand, having served six years in the House of Representatives and 10 more in the Senate representing Oklahoma.
“We over the last 60 years have built a gigantic, uncontrollable behemoth in Washington through the career politician, much to the detriment of our kids and our grandkids,” Coburn said in a recent interview with “The Hagmann Report.” “And so what happens is most people who go to Washington succumb to the power and the trappings of power rather than keep their oath.”
Coburn said he left the Senate in 2015 partly because he didn’t see a solution for the country in Washington. Apparently, neither do most Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, only 20 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.”
“That’s a disaster, because that means we have an illegitimate federal government if people don’t support it,” Coburn remarked.
However, the answer is not anarchy, according to the senator, but rather a tool America’s Founding Fathers built into the Constitution to allow citizens to restore the balance of power between the federal government and the states. That tool is the Article V Convention, also known as an Amendments Convention.
“The most fun thing I do is to talk to people who have never heard about Article V, because most Americans think there’s just nothing to do,” said Coburn, who serves as a senior adviser to the Convention of States project.
“You know, ‘(They think) the politics is slanted, we can’t have any influence on our congressmen or senators, it’s just going to be that way,’ and people have kind of given up. And what you tell them is you individually can make a difference by becoming an activist for Article V in your state.”
An Article V Convention is one of two methods by which the U.S. Constitution can be amended, but it has never been used in American history.
Two-thirds of the 50 state legislatures must pass an application asking Congress to call a convention at which amendments to the Constitution may be proposed. All state applications must ask for a convention dealing with the same issue or set of issues, and if the states meet the requirement, Congress cannot block the convention. The states, not Congress, get to choose their delegates to send to the convention. The states have the right to guard against a “runaway convention” by limiting debate to the consideration of a single topic or set of topics, according to the Convention of States project.
Any amendments agreed upon by the convention delegates would then be sent back to the states for approval, and three-fourths of state legislatures would need to ratify an amendment for it to become part of the Constitution.
Coburn does not believe Americans have anything to lose by pursuing an Article V Convention.
“The only danger or downside to it is not doing it,” he declared.
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