Did you hear? President Trump is going to be running for a third term in office. And he’s not joking. Who knows how serious he is, but as we’re going to see, the constitutionality of third presidential term may not be as set in stone as many suspect. Along with the rest of the US Constitution. A constitutional convention could be just around the corner. Just a lawsuit away. And we can thank the DC austerity lobby and their fellow travelers at the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the American Legislative Exchange Committee (ALEC) for this looming threat. The same austerity lobby that has spent years trying to roll back Obamacare, eviscerate Medicare and Medicaid through block-grants, and generally erode what’s left of the US’s social safety-nets as more and more Americans are forced to take any work available just to qualify for increasingly meager government assistance. That austerity lobby. It’s back with a big sneaky plan: a lawsuit purporting to prove that the 34 state threshold for an Article V constitutional convention has already been met. David M. Walker — the former US Comptroller for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — is leading the legal effort, with legal support from NRA lawyer (and CNP member) Charles “Chuck” Cooper. If the lawsuit succeeds, get ready for a new constitution written by and for the oligarchy.
But this story isn’t just about this new lawsuit. It’s also about how the DC austerity lobby has been working with CNP to push these constitutional convention ambitions since at least 2013, which is right around the same time it become clear that the last major round of DC austerity lobbying had failed in achieving a “grand bargain” of slashed entitlements. A round of lobbying that began in earnest as the 2008 financial crisis was still playing out with David Walker — then President and CEO of the newly formed austerity-centric Pete Peterson Foundation — taking on a lead role as public austerity advocate. The Great Recession was a great opportunity for a “grand bargain”. And it almost worked. But didn’t work, at least not entirely, and it wasn’t long after that failure became clear that we saw the austerity lobby and the CNP begin hatching far more ambitious plans. Plans that just might be about come to fruition. Because as we’re also going to see, if a constitutional convention does happen, the forces behind this plan are the ones who will be running it. The DC austerity lobby really is just a lawsuit away from winning everything.
Christian Nationalism isn’t simply on the rise in the United States. It’s already at the top, thanks in no small part to the Council for National Policy (CNP) and the myriad of groups operating under its theocratic umbrella. The Supreme Court is dominated by a hard right majority and there’s even the CNP’s planned mass purges — starting with the government but not ending there — under the ‘Schedule F’/Project 2025 label. That’s all part of the grim context surrounding a series of reports around the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson that should raise serious questions about just how much influence the leading Christian Nationalist hold over new Speaker of the House. But thanks the House and Supreme Court aren’t the only government institution under Christian Nationalism sway. States Republicans are increasingly adopting Christian Nationalist laws, with Texas leading the way under the way under the vision of CNP pseudo-historian David Barton. It turns out Johnson and Barton are long-time allies who share the same vision for the future. A vision in line with the ‘discipleship’ form of authoritarian Christianity now mainstreamed in the CNP-dominated network of 47,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Which also happens to be a denomination grappling with a sex abuse mega-scandal hauntingly reminiscent of the Catholic Church’s mega-abuse scandal. A mega-scandal with a number of major CNP figures operating as abusers or enablers. It’s that broader intersection of Mike Johnson’s ties to Christian Nationalism with this growing SBC abuse mega-scandal that we’re going to look at in this post.
“One nation under God.” It’s a familiar phrase for modern Americans. But how about the phrase “One nation under God, and one religion under God”? That was the call recently made by Michael Flynn. As we’re going to see, Flynn wasn’t just speaking for fellow theocrats when he called for an end to the separation of church and state. He was voicing the views of some of the most powerful lobbies operating in DC. Groups like the Council for National Policy (CNP) that represent the merger of corporate (Koch) and theocratic interests. A network that for all practical purposes is the Republican Party’s oligarch establishment, pushing a theocratic agenda with a goal of not just conferring special rights for Christians but effectively ending democracy itself. Because as we’re also going to see, just as you can’t separate the GOP establishment from the theocratic CNP, you can’t separate the GOP’s party-wide push to overturn the 2020 election results from the CNP either. The death of representative democracy in the US is very much a ‘God’-ordained project.
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