Who's attacking the Constitution? Citing the threat of terrorism, a cabal of influential saboteurs is proposing assorted amendments that would destroy our constitutional checks and balances.

The Continuity of Government Commission (COG) has burst onto the scene with great fanfare. Virtually unknown a year ago, its reports and press conferences now command headlines and the rapt attention of major news networks. In record time, it has launched a movement to amend the U.S. Constitution, ostensibly to correct the document's shortcomings relative to the Age of Terrorism.

It helps, of course, that the commission boasts an impressive lineup. Its honorary co-chairs are former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Its co-chairs are former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler and former Senator Alan Simpson. Other prominent COG members include former House Speakers Tom Foley and Newt Gingrich, Clinton Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, Reagan Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein, Clinton adviser and confidant Strobe Talbott, Bush Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin, Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume.

The commission wields considerable clout that it is using to force-feed the American public what it claims are urgently needed remedies for the plague of terrorism. A close look at the COG proposals and the individuals and organizations behind them, however, shows that there is more cause to fear the offered cure than the potential illness. In short, the individuals leading the COG initiative and the groups backing the effort have been involved in a decades-long subversive campaign to overturn the Constitution. They are publicly on record in favor of striking down the Constitution's checks and balances and its separation of powers. Many of them have openly advocated transforming our republic into a parliamentary system similar to that of various European governments. Over the past two decades they have pushed hard for a constitutional convention (con-con) for the purpose of restructuring our government based on the parliamentary model, which would be more conducive to centralized control than our present constitutional system. Now, in this current "crisis," they are attempting to achieve piecemeal what they have failed to accomplish by their abortive con-con effort. Several pieces of legislation and several constitutional amendments have been introduced in Congress to advance the COG agenda.

Subversive Pedigree

The pedigree of the Continuity of Government Commission leads back to similar groups launched in the 1980s to help effect the radical con-con revision of the Constitution. Chief among these was the Committee on the Constitutional System (CCS). A key individual in the efforts then and now is consummate Washington insider Lloyd N. Cutler, White House counselor to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and senior partner in the high-powered Washington, D.C., law firm of Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering. In 2002, Cutler launched the COG, which he co-chairs along with Alan Simpson, former Republican Senator of Wyoming. Twenty years earlier, in 1982, Cutler helped launch the CCS, which he co-chaired with former Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon and Senator Nancy Landon Kassebaum (R-Kan).

Like COG, membership in CCS comprised a glittering array of former senators and congressmen, members of the Cabinet and White House staff, journalists, lawyers, scholars, and business and financial leaders.

Cutler helped pave the way to the formation of the CCS with an essay, entitled "To Form a Government," that appeared in the Fall 1980 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. "In parliamentary terms," Cutler's article argued, "one might say that under the U.S. Constitution it is not now feasible to 'form a Government.' The separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches, whatever its merits in 1793, has become a structure that almost guarantees stalemate today."

Making it very clear that he favored changing our political system to a parliamentary form that joined the legislative and executive powers, Cutler advocated empowering the president "to dissolve Congress and call for new congressional elections." Also, following the lead of many parliamentary governments, he proposed that the president be permitted, or even required, "to select 50 percent of his Cabinet from among the members of his party in the Senate and House, who would retain their seats while serving in the Cabinet." This commingling of executive and legislative powers, he acknowledged, would require a major change of the Constitution's Article I, Section 6, which provides that "no person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either house during his continuance in Office."

Cutler also suggested was that the "President, Vice President, Senators and Congressmen would all be elected for simultaneous six-year terms." Cutler concluded his essay with this appeal: "We need to do better than we have in 'forming a Government' for this country, and this need is becoming more acute. The structure of our Constitution prevents us from doing significantly better. It is time to start thinking and debating about whether and how to correct this structural fault." Cutler and his fellow constitutional revisionists have been thinking, debating, and scheming without letup ever since. The supposed structural faults they are obsessed about doing away with are the very checks and balances that the American Founding Fathers installed to safeguard our liberties.

In a 1982 speech, Cutler's CCS co-chairman, C. Douglas Dillon, observed, "Today, possibly the most important longer range question facing us as a nation, a question transcending all immediate issues, is whether we can continue to afford the luxury of the separation of power in Washington between the executive and the legislative branches of our government."

"You may ask," he continued, "'What is the alternative?' The answer could well be ... a change to some form of parliamentary government that would eliminate or sharply reduce the present division of authority between the executive and legislative arms of government."

Professor James MacGregor Bums, a CCS board member, likewise endorsed the "wisdom of constitutional revision." In his 1984 book The Power to Lead, Bums expressed his frustration and unequivocally admitted the CCS gang's subversive intent: "The framers have simply been too shrewd for us. They have outwitted us. They designed separated institutions that cannot be unified by mechanical linkages, frail bridges, tinkering. If we are to 'turn the founders upside down'--to put together what they put asunder--we must directly confront the constitutional structure they erected." Burns went on to propose radical constitutional revisions remarkably similar to those put forward by Cutler, Dillon, and other CCS members.

So how did these elite revisionists expect to overcome the framers' shrewd constitutional structures and "turn the founders upside down"? Especially, since they acknowledged that the American public was not exactly keen on following the CCS leadership. In The Power to Lead, Burns gave a clue: "I doubt that Americans under normal conditions could agree on the package of radical and 'alien' constitutional changes that would be required. They would do so, I think, only during and following a stupendous national crisis and political failure."

This notion of taking advantage of a grave crisis to force the desired constitutional restructuring has been a frequent theme in the writings and speeches of the CCS members and their related brethren. A CCS report on the group's meeting held on April 17, 1986, at Harvard, for instance, provides this summary impression of cochairman C. Douglas Dillon's statements: "Some others have been more interested in direct action right away, which he [Dillon] does not favor now. He thinks needed changes can be made only after a period of great crisis. But adequate discussion should be held in advance so that if such a crisis occurs there will be some useful background material available." (Emphasis added.)

What kind of crisis or emergency might suffice for this great purpose? CCS members opined that a protracted budget crisis might provide adequate impetus. Unfortunately, for those hopefuls, repeated budget crises failed to achieve the fright level necessary to stampede the American public in favor of their subversive schemes. Some hoped that global environmental crises would supply the golden key. Cutler and others, however, correctly recognized that environmental doomsday scenarios were too long-term and probably lacked the oomph needed to do the job.

Pretext for Change

Finally, after years of patient groundwork, a crisis has come along that seems far more promising: the 9-11 attacks and the ongoing War on Terror.

The Continuity of Government Commission was formally launched one year after the September 11th terror spree as a joint initiative of the Brookings Institution (usually described as liberal) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI, usually described as conservative). Ties abound between the earlier CCS and the current COG. Brookings also partnered and financially backed the CCS effort in the 1980s, along with the usual funders of subversive causes, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. They have been joined in the COG effort by the Carnegie Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, all of which have contributed generously to left-wing and globalist causes.

The Brookings and AEI think tanks sup plying much of the brain power for the COG are actually auxiliaries for the real brain trust pushing this initiative: the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Take, for instance, AEI scholar Norman Ornstein and Brookings Senior Fellow Thomas' Mann, who do much of COG's heavy lifting and media appearances. Both are veteran CFR members. Co-chairman Cutler is a longtime member and former board director of the CFR. COG's honorary co-chairs, former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, also are CFR members. So are COG members Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, Donna Shalala, Kenneth Duberstein, Strobe Talbott, Lynn Martin, and Jamie Gorelick.

This follows the same pattern that we have seen at CCS and dozens of other highfalutin' commissions and panels over the years. The CFR, headquartered at the historic Pratt House in New York City, is not merely the staid, nonpartisan "discussion group" it frequently portrays itself to be. The council was aptly described by Admiral Chester Ward, a former CFR member, as a clique of "one-world-global-government-ideologists" formed for the "purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." Journalist Richard Rovere, also a CFR member, more fondly described the Pratt House group as "a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation."

Rovere's comparison of the CFR to the Presidium, the secret cabal that ran the Soviet government behind the scenes, was apropos. This semi-secret CFR presidium has been working in the shadows both inside and outside of the U.S. government for more than eight decades, always guiding our destiny in a totalitarian direction, always laboring to undermine the checks and balances of our constitutional republic.

As the CFR sees it, the U.S. Constitution erects impenetrable obstacles that "militate against the development of responsible government." In one of its very early and revealing reports, Survey of American Relations (1928), we find the council lamenting:

   The Roman republic and the Hanoverian
   monarchy described by Montesquieu
   and Blackstone were both
   governments of separation of powers
   maintained by checks and balances.
   Both were forced to achieve unity by
   the increase of international complications.
   One went the way of executive
   sovereignty; the other that of parliamentary
   sovereignty. The difficulties
   in the way of either such development
   in the United States are obvious.
   While presidents have sometimes
   acted like dictators in brief emergencies,
   an intensive reaction of congressional
   control has always followed.
   The jealous control of the
   purse by Congress is a check
   which would inevitably curb an
   ambitious president.... Furthermore,
   the physical separation of
   the cabinet from Congress, the
   comparative equality of power
   of the two houses, rendering
   each a check upon the other, the
   "states' rights" sentiment which
   prevents a gradual subordination
   of the Senate, and the position of
   the Supreme Court as final interpreter
   of the constitutional
   separation of powers--all these
   militate against the development
   of responsible government.

The Continuity of Government Commission is pursuing the same subversive agenda that the CFR has been trying to advance throughout most of the 20th century, and that other CFR fronts like the CCS have been promoting aggressively over the past several decades. There is probably no more popular support for the CFR/COG scheme now than there was for the earlier constitutional reform plots. However, they now have a credible crisis they can exploit to advance their long--coveted goal. The media cartel has swung into action behind the COG initiative. The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Herald, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, PBS, ABC, and other faithful retailers of the party line have issued supportive editorials and/or provided generous space for pro-COG articles and op-eds.

Over the coming months, it's a sure bet they will be fanning every terrorist incident and every terrorist threat, real or contrived, into a conflagration that will aid their destructive goals. But if a significant number of Americans can be helped to recognize the threat looming behind the so-called reform proposals, we can avert a national stampede into this dangerous trap.