COS Legacy: Report from Committee on Style and Detail - Article V Convention Simulation 2023 Ep.4

Welcome to the Convention of States Legacy Podcast, a weekly program that looks back at historic content from our archives. We hope you are educated and inspired by today's edition. Today you will get to hear audio from a simulated Article 5 Convention with 49 state delegations consisting mostly of sitting or previous state legislators. Hosted by Convention of States Foundation in August of 2023, the event was held in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. This is part one of the final plenary session, wherein a roll call is made, prayers are offered, and a committee on style and detail give its report. Convention will come to order, outsiders outside. Welcome to this general session of the Convention of States, a simulated convention here for August 4, 2023. We want to thank all those who have made this possible through the Convention of States and thank all the delegations who have arrived from across our nation. The reason for holding this convention is that Article 5 was provided by our founders as a way to solve problems when they arise, especially when Congress is not acting and give the people the chance to send delegations to consider amendments to the Constitution. It has never been done exactly like this, and so this is an opportunity to demonstrate to the people of our country how this could be done and what some of the results might be. What those watching may not know is that 48 hours ago almost none of us knew each other. So we've been organized in that time, we've gotten to meet, we had one day of committees, and this is our first day to have a general session, our only day to consider proposals on final passage. So please, if you're watching and you see things that you think should be further thought out, just remember we've only had a brief time to consider the things that we do. They would certainly be considered in more depth in an actual Convention of States, and we're hoping that happens. Today we're going to deal with six proposals that have been reported by committee, and when we do that, we should have some time left over. And if we do, I'm going to invite commissioners who'd like to come up and say some things at the end of the Convention of their impressions and their recommendations for future conventions. So having said all of that, I'd like to begin with the roll call of the states. And if you would, please stand when your state is called and respond to the call. Thank you, Mr. President. We will call the roll by state. Would the state delegation chairperson please stand in state present if a majority of your state delegation is here? Alabama. President Alaska. Arizona. Arkansas. California. Colorado. Connecticut. Delaware. Florida. Georgia. Arizona. Hawaii. Idaho. Illinois. Indiana. Iowa. Kansas. Kentucky. Louisiana. Maine. Maryland. Massachusetts. Michigan. Minnesota. Mississippi. Missouri. Montana. Nebraska. Nevada. New Hampshire. New Jersey. New Mexico. New York. North Carolina. North Dakota. Ohio. Oklahoma. Oregon. Pennsylvania. South Carolina. South Dakota. Tennessee. Texas. Utah. Washington. Virginia. Washington. West Virginia. Wisconsin. Wyoming. Mr. President, we have 49 of the states who have appointed delegates here. 49 states president. Now I would like to recognize our vice president, Senator Jason Rapper, who represents the state of Arkansas and thank him for his help. He has been involved in every aspect of these proceedings and done a wonderful job. Now we would like to proceed to the invocation and I am going to invite three of our members to serve as chaplain. I would like each one of them to come up and each one will lead us in a prayer. Representative Tim Genter of the state of Ohio. Representative Patrick Penn of the state of Kansas. And Senator Mike McKay of the state of Maryland if you would come please. And then each of you if you could lead us in a word of prayer. I want to say listening to President Washington. I think the members here are assembled without the passions of a region or the evils of parting and with due regard for morality and virtue. And I can assure you everyone here today is proud to be called an American. Thank you, sir, please proceed. Thank you, Mr. President. Well, I debated about writing my prayer as we stand together. I debated about writing my prayer on the paper because I was told many years ago by a senior pastor that you can't hold fire on paper. But then another individual I respected remarked but you can start a good fire with paper. And as the thoughts began to course through my mind I thought at 68 years of age I may not remember everything that I feel like I'm supposed to say. So I did write it down for us to pray today. Let us pray together, Heavenly Father, we purposely pause at the beginning of this session to illustrate the priority of your place in these proceedings. More than an obligatory nod to omnipotence, we through this act of prayer humbly make an official invitation for you to be present with us. And not just present as observer but present in participation and communication to us and hopefully through us as we consider and debate points of vital importance to this great nation. Although this gathering is a simulated convention the purpose for it is very real. Our nation is rapidly heading the wrong direction and gaining momentum. Time is of essence and that which we do we must do quickly. If our founders who gather just a short distance from this very location recognize the importance of your blessing upon their efforts how much more should we in this critical hour of our nation's history implore your sovereign aid. So as we gather here with the purpose of reinforcing those foundations established by our forefathers that have so long endured may we also have the wisdom to look toward those foundations whose builder and architect is God. For blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord and the people who he has chosen for our inheritance and his inheritance. O God, turn our hearts and the hearts of our children and their children back to you. We conclude with confidence because you have a plan and purpose and you have told us that what you have said that you will bring about, what you have planned that you will do. May that which we do both here today and in the future align with your plan and purpose and thereby benefit the people of our nation, the United States of America. All this we ask in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. Amen. Representative Pimp? Father, we come to you by that name. You magnify and reveal yourself by the names that you have given to us of yourself and the first one that you have given us as Father. So Father, as your children, we humbly come to you and we ask you, we implore, we beg of you to impart to us not only your wisdom but also your example of what right looks like. Father, for these members that are assembled here right now, Lord, I thank you for each of their hearts, each of their passions, each of their minds. The things that they have said, the things that they have done, the conversations that they have had over this short visit have been wrapped and bathed and clothed in your mercy, your grace and in your instruction. So Lord, I ask you right now to be an encouragement to them. As you said in Joshua, that we should be strong and a good courage because Lord our God goes before us, you told it to us over three times, so you meant that thing. So Lord, right now I ask you to gird up every single member here with courage, with strength, with determination. And Father, we pray right now against and rebuke a spirit of cowardice and a spirit of indifference or apathy against the things that we know that are right that you have not only laid down in your word but which you also inspired us to lay down in our Constitution. For these are your humble servants. These are your children, Lord. And I pray, Father, for their family members that have so graciously given each one of them up into this service, I ask that you give your angels charge over each one of their families, keep them safe, keep them safe from hurt and harm and danger, Lord. And as we travel over our various ways and highways and airways back, Lord, I ask that you give us good favor as well. But Father, as we leave out of this place and never out of your presence, Lord, we ask you right now to raise up remnant, the black row regimen. For those pastors that don't get into politics, Father put the politics into the pastors, Lord, because we need you right now and the authority that we appeal to under heaven comes only from you and your son, Jesus Christ. And it is in his name that we pray, Father, so that we might all be able to say in the name of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, and thank God Almighty because of you we are free at last. Thank you. Senator McKay here. Yes, we should come forward if you would. Thank you, Mr. President. One of my favorite passages is Amos 7-8. And it talks about a plumb line, and I'll see that when I meet my people Israel will not pass before us. I tend to believe that everything we do here today, we need to remember the plumb line as close to the word as possible. But as most especially as close to the member in which our Constitution has been formed, I therefore offer this prayer. Almighty Father, who has given us good land for our heritage, we come to you today asking for your blessing, your covering as we conduct this simulated convention. May this gathering be conducted in order, conducted in peace, but also closed in harmony. For your honor and your glory, we pray in your son's name, Jesus Christ. Amen. Last night, the committee on silent drafting was meeting rather late. I wish you could have all witnessed what happened because at the end of the meeting, the members and some of the leaders of the convention were there, and they prayed so fervently for this convention and for our country with great passion and emotion. So there are prayers going up all over this country to save our nation and to preserve its greatness. I know that we will proceed today in that spirit. Our pledge of allegiance, Senator Tom McGillroy. Senator, are you here? Please join me in the pledge to the United States of America. I pledge allegiance to the Father of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Please be seated. Now the staff tells me that in our rules, there was an omission, and in the list of motions was not included the words of previous question. So I'd like to ask now if there's no objection that we add previous questions to the list of motions that are available without objection, so order. Now we have the committee on silent drafting has been working hard to go over all of the different proposals, and I'd like to ask the chairman, who is Jay McMahon of the commissioner from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to come forth. And I'm going to ask Mr. Commissioner, if you would, we'll take all of these reports in Globo, and I think you're going to find that the changes that the committee has recommended here are all very technical. And there is one change, I want to say, Mr. Commissioner, that parish isn't as spelled, it should be P-A-R-I-S-H, so if we could make that correction. If you would proceed, Mr. Chairman, and explain the recommendations of the committee on silent drafting, hopefully with one motion, we'll be able to adopt these unless there are any changes so that we can move on and have clean versions of their proposals to consider one by one. And may I say, Mr. Jay, that you were chosen for this job, you did such a wonderful job running for Attorney General in the state of Massachusetts, very distinguished attorney, and appropriate that you have this role. Thank you, Mr. President. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow commissioners, it is a privilege and an honor to be here with you this morning, being in the presence of God's people. Thank you for holding this convention, and thank you for allowing me and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to participate. Now, one of the first things that the gentleman from Louisiana did upon assuming the presidency of this convention was that he appointed a committee, a drafting and style committee. A drafting and style committee, just about every legislature in the United States, every state legislature, House and Senate, and also the Congress and the Senate. There is a committee that reviews bills and proposals, and they look for the drafting, the styling, the spelling, the grammar, and it requires the body to approve those changes. Now, they're technical. They're not substance. The substantive changes will be done later. So, as you will recall, when you came in, you were handed two packets, one packet contained what was submitted by the committees. And in that packet, you will see that there are some changes, our proposed changes. And we're going to go through them, point by point, but we're going to do it quickly, and if there's objections, we'll take those up. But in all sense of the exercise here this morning, these are just technical changes. So, we'll go to the first one. It's the committee on term limits and judicial restraint in proposal two. The only changes we have is the statutory construction. Numbers are spelled out unless they are indicating articles, chapters, sections, or clauses. So, in this case here, the number nine was spelled out, and the number six was spelled out in the proposal two. Then when we go to the next on the committee for fiscal restraints, you will see in the second line, we spelled out 18%. In section two, we spelled out two-thirds and eighth, where it says eighth, meaning the number eighth, we... Mr. Chairman, I don't think we need to go through all of those. We've changed everything from written out numbers to using the letters instead. And what other changes do you think we need? The only other change that I could see that would be of importance that you at least want to take a look at is under the federal legislative and executive jurisdiction. Under section one, because of statutory construction, we took out the words, the term, and then we took out the quotations because quotations are not used in statutes and bills. And we capitalized commerce, so we started that, that is merely a technical change. In section four, we also removed the quotation marks from navigable waters, and then following down to proposal two, in proposal two, in section one, there was a term provisions issued by the, and in statutory construction, it would have been, it's more precise to say, any actions of Congress. So that change was made there. Also, capitalizations, we took the capitalizations off of administrative agencies. We also took out some commas, as you will see, after agencies in the United States. And then in the, we added commas after article Roman numeral two, after section two, and then put a period at clause one, because this is the constitution of the United States. Any questions on these technical amendments? Is there any objection to adopting in global the changes to these proposals? Question from the state of Utah, please identify yourself. Yes, come on up to the lecture, if you would. I think the change is all accurately reflect the discussion that we had. There's one minor exception in section two of the committee on federal legislative executive jurisdiction proposal three, and section two, where it says any land in any given county. I believe we discussed last night that the technical term is county equivalent. The reason for that being that Alaska has burrows. Others have other names that they have for their county equivalent. And so as we had from our parliamentarian, that the appropriate term would be county equivalent. I understood that we were going to do that as substantive amendments in terms of rather than adding additional words. We're going to add it here. I would suggest that parish be changed to county equivalent so that it encompasses all of the various county equivalents throughout the United States. All right, would you like to propose that as an amendment? I would approach the commission. Is there any objection? Hearing none, that change is adopted to the proposed amendments. Any further conversation that you had, Mr. Chairman? No, and indeed with that, I would support the passage of the rest of these technical style amendments. Commissioner McMahon, Mr. Chairman, did you have any further comments? That will do it as far as the technical aspects of the drafting and styling committee. And I thank you, Mr. President, for allowing us to present. Thank you very much. Since we made that change, any objection to the adoption of the amendments with that change that we did. Hearing none, they are adopted. One thing we skipped over, we'll go back for a minute, is the adoption of the amendments from yesterday's general session. I've looked over them, they seem fine, except I would like to point out that I announced the appointment of Mr. Gray Garifalo as Chairman of the Rules Committee. So I'd like to ask that that be added to the minutes of the committee. Any other changes or suggestions, any objections to the adoption of amendments? Hearing none, they are adopted. So now we're into the major part of our proceedings today. We have from the committees a number of proposals. I believe there are six proposals. The way we're going to proceed will ask the chairman of the committee to come forward and handle each proposal separately. Each chairman will have five minutes to explain the proposal. And then we'll be open for questions, amendments, speaking for or against. And I'd like to ask that if people speak for or against, that we limit that to three minutes per person. And under the rules, you can only come back and speak a second time on a given proposal. So I'd like to introduce now Representative Dan U-Banks, Commissioner from the State of Mississippi to discuss and offer the proposal on term limits. Commissioner U-Banks, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the Convention of States Legacy Podcast. To learn more about our grassroots movement, go to www.conventionofstates.com.