Steve Bannon will be sentenced this week for contempt of Congress and faces additional criminal liability for his role in Jan. 6, but the former White House chief strategist is moving closer to radically rewriting the U.S. Constitution to match his right-wing extremist mindset.
Ahead of his possible prison term, Bannon has been devoting recent episodes of his online "War Room" program to the Convention of the States that's backed by billionaire GOP donors and corporate interests that would drastically revise the constitution to limit the size and scope of the federal government and give far greater power to corporations and their wealthy owners, reported The Guardian.
“This is another line of attack strategically,” Bannon told viewers last month. “You now have a political movement that understands we need to go after the administrative state.”
Tea Party co-founder Mark Meckler heads the Convention of the States Action, one of the largest proponents of the tactic, has appeared on Bannon's program to spell out the movement's anti-democratic nature aimed at preventing progressive policies from being implemented by Democratic presidents.
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“The problem is, any time the administration swings back to Democrat – or radical progressive, or Marxist which is what they are – we are going to lose the gains," Meckler said. "So you do the structural fix.”
Article V of the Constitution sets out two ways to revise the founding document, and all 27 amendments so far have been approved by two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate and then ratified by three-quarters of the states, but Meckler and other right-wing activists want to choose the other route and have two-thirds of all 50 state legislatures call a constitutional convention of their own.
“This is something that can happen very quickly," said Rick Santorum, a former GOP senator who advises Meckler's group. "We are a lot further along than people think.”
Groups linked to hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and conservative legal activist Leonard Leo are helping to fund these efforts, and extreme partisan gerrymandering have allowed Republicans to double their control of state legislatures from 14 in 2010 to 31 this year, and a convention of the states would give each state one vote -- dramatically increasing the power of small rural states over populous progressive states.
“We have the opportunity, as a result, to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us,” Santorum told a private meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council late last year.
Republicans could be able to fast-track these efforts if they take back both houses of Congress next month.
“If the Republicans prevail in Congress, they could try to call a convention right away,” said former Democratic senator Russ Feingold, co-author of a new book, The Constitution in Jeopardy, warning against this threat. “People should know that when they go to vote in November – this could fundamentally undermine their rights in a way that is both disturbing and permanent.”
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