A couple of excerpts from The Liberty Amendments, written by bestselling author, attorney, president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, talk radio host Mark R. Levin, who worked in the Reagan administration and was chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese.

The book details a plan, a path, some even call the rip-cord, for preserving the government as the founders intended from an over-reaching one as exists today. It was so important, it was put in the Constitution in Article V.

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and the delegates to each state’s ratification convention foresaw a time when the Federal government might breach the Constitution’s limits and begin oppressing the people. Agencies such as the IRS and EPA and programs such as Obamacare demonstrate that the Framers’ fear was prescient.

The founders knew that in the event of an over-reaching or out-of-control branch, or branches, of federal government, the states needed a remedy to correct, since the tyrannical branch(s) in question would never allow itself to be corrected. This is what Article V was written for.

Prior to his inauguration, do you remember president-elect Obama saying we were just days away from “fundamentally transforming the United States of America?”

By this, of course, President Barack Obama did not mean a fresh allegiance to the nation’s founding principles and a new respect for the Constitution’s limits on federal authority, but the converse. He is more blatant and aggressive than his twentieth-century predecessors, but faithfully follows the footsteps of the most transgressive among them.

Having delegated broad lawmaking power to executive branch departments and agencies of its own creation, contravening the separation-of-powers doctrine, Congress now watches as the president inﬂates the congressional delegations even further and proclaims repeatedly the authority to rule by executive ﬁat in deﬁance of, or over the top of, the same Congress that sanctioned a domineering executive branch in the ﬁrst place. Notwithstanding Congress’s delinquency, but because of it, an unquenched President Obama, in a hurry to expedite a societal makeover, has repeatedly admonished Congress that “[i]f [it] won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will!”—that is, if Congress will not genuﬂect to his demands, and pass laws to his liking, he will act on his own.

And the president has made good on his refrain. On a growing list of matters, he has, in fact, displayed an impressive aptitude for imperial rule. With the help of a phalanx of policy “czars,” from immigration, the environment, and labor law to health care, welfare, and energy, the president has exercised his executive “discretion” to create new law, abrogate existing law, and generally contrive ways to exploit legal ambiguities as a means to his ends. He has also declared the Senate in recess when it was not, thereby bypassing the Senate’s constitutional “advice and consent” role to install several partisans in top federal posts.

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a deﬁned enumeration of speciﬁc grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, healthcare provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

A convention of the states, per Article V of the Constitution is the antidote for such a tyrannical federal government.

Article V sets forth the two processes for amending the Constitution, the second of which I have emphasized in italics:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratiﬁed by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratiﬁcation may be proposed by the Congress.

Read Chapter One of The Liberty Amendments below. Courtesy of its author, Mark R. Levin.

Link: Convention of States