You want a scary number? Here's a scary number.

33.

That's the number of state legislatures over which the Republican Party now has complete control.

You want a scarier number?

34.

That's the number of state legislatures required now to call a new constitutional convention under Article V of the Constitution.

An Article V convention has been a lollipop on the political right for some time now. To constitutional experts, a new convention is like talking about the neutron bomb. Advocates of the Article V movement insist that they can limit a convention to certain topics. (Most of these topics are pretty awful on their own as they seem to be directed at re-establishment of the Articles of Confederation, if not the Confederate States of America.) The problem with that is that there absolutely no precedent in law or in history to back up that contention.

The last constitutional convention we had was supposed to improve the Articles. It ended up throwing out the entire government and starting from scratch. That's why serious constitutional scholars are scared to death of one. Well, that, and the fact that we'd be trading in James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Mason for Mark Levin and the bizarre political fauna of places like Kansas and Kentucky.

I'll pass. The problem is that the country might not.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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