Jack of Harts

The Convention of States during the Second Great Depression changed the United States of America in several fundamental ways. They repealed the Sixteenth Amendment that allowed the Federal government to directly tax individuals. They repealed the Seventeenth Amendment. That returned selection of Senators to their State governments, giving the States direct control over the Senate again. They also changed how Representatives were selected by implementing State-wide proportional elections for the preferred political party. That ended the Republican-Democrat Two-Party system that had dominated America for two centuries by allowing any political party to win a House Seat as long as they were able to win enough votes in a State that had multiple seats. They added term limits to Federal positions, including the House and Senate. They recalled the new Supreme Court Justices packed into the expanded Supreme Court by the administration of the time. They passed numerous other amendments aimed strictly at curtailing the powers the Federal government had over the States, and placed far harder limitations on what roles the Federal government was allowed to perform. The States went in with the intention of hobbling the Federal government so it could not control them in the future. They succeeded.

The Convention of States convened in the middle of the Second Great Depression to judge the United States of America’s Federal government on charges of facilitating the death and destruction caused in so many American cities. The first major complication they ran into was that many States had sent more than one delegation. Many of the State capitols had fallen to the rioters and looters that plagued the larger cities, and so those State delegations came from wherever the working government had regrouped in. But many of the occupiers sent their own delegations, often fronted by members of the State government who supported them. They declared that only they were the rightful government of their States and demanded the removal of the other delegations from the convention. After long arguments over the merits of each delegation, the convention conducted a simple majority vote concerning which delegations to accept. This was not popular amongst those who lost, and they loudly denounced the convention as hopelessly partisan and corrupt on every major remaining network. The President quickly addressed those “grave concerns” by ordering the convention to stand down until “the contested delegations could be investigated by the proper authorities.” When the convention refused his order, he declared that they lacked any standing to enforce “any and all fraudulent resolutions it may show the extreme lack of good judgment to pass.”