Chuck Darwin<p>Giving twenty-six of the smallest states, which represent less than 20 percent of the population, veto power over federal protections would take the 'united' out of the United States.</p><p>Frustrated by the surprise defeat of Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race, a group of breathtakingly rich and highly strategic actors on the radical right, including the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Koch</span></a> brothers, quietly launched an ambitious new campaign to lock in their political control once and for all. </p><p>They had used their immense wealth and institution-building savvy to capture a majority of state legislatures in 2010, so the groundwork was already in place.</p><p>This campaign would be spearheaded by a corporate pay-to-play group they had long funded to influence state laws—the American Legislative Exchange Council (<a href="https://c.im/tags/ALEC" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ALEC</span></a> )—and a dark money group with deep ties to Charles and the late David Koch (who died in 2019), as well as the Tea Party movement—Citizens for Self-Governance (<a href="https://c.im/tags/CSG" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CSG</span></a> ). </p><p>When legislators arrived at ALEC’s annual meeting in August 2013, they were given detailed instructions and model text to bring back to their statehouses for a resolution demanding the first Constitutional convention since 1787.</p><p>These donors and operatives are aiming to radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution, so they incentivized complicity from needed allies. </p><p>“State legislators were promised bundled campaign contributions and grassroots support if they joined this effort to amend the federal Constitution,” wrote Chris Taylor, a Democrat who was serving at the time as a Wisconsin state representative, after attending the meeting. (Taylor is now a judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.)</p><p>When legislators returned for ALEC’s policy summit at the Grand Hyatt Washington hotel that December, Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler led a workshop on the plan, organized by his newly formed "Convention of States," a project of CSG, over which he also presides. Immediately following that meeting, 100 legislators from across the country headed to Mount Vernon—George Washington’s former plantation in Virginia—for a four-hour planning session on how to win the thirty-four states needed to make the plan a reality</p><p><a href="https://progressive.org/magazine/far-right-plan-for-a-new-confederacy-maclean-pearson-20231211/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">progressive.org/magazine/far-r</span><span class="invisible">ight-plan-for-a-new-confederacy-maclean-pearson-20231211/</span></a></p>