Quantico Scaremongers Against Popular Sovereignty

This week's season-penultimate episode of Quantico promulgated a typical elitist dread of radical democracy by painting a Constitutional Convention as something scary that an authoritarian villain would use to get his way. I posted this to their Facebook page:

Very disappointed at your antidemocratic scaremongering about a Constitutional Convention. The Framers had the unprecedented wisdom to realize they couldn't anticipate the needs of future generations, and so incorporated procedures for amendment into their document -- piecemeal through submission by Congress but also, when time came for a thorough overhaul, through submission by a Convention called by Congress. Your script falsely suggests such a Convention might change the Constitution behind the country's back, when in reality nothing it proposes would become law unless ratified by three-fourths of the states, making majority popular support a prerequisite. Further, while Congress -- not the President -- is charged with setting the rules, it's politically inevitable they would call fresh elections for the delegates to such a convention. The whole procedure concretizes the principle stated in the Declaration of Independence: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such forms, as shall to them seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." This is the revolutionary-democratic idea at the founding of our country -- yet you find it not inspiring, but scary? And it's noteworthy that, while you portray this mechanism of popular sovereignty as the machination of a Trump-manquee villain, in real life it's not Trump, but the left-wing Justice Democrats who are calling for it in their platform. (If you haven't heard of them, they're the faction seeking to primary all corporatist Democrats in Congress and replace them with progressives.) For more information on the Article V Convention and why it's not only politically but legally overdue, check out Friends of the Article V Convention.