Rick Perry Campaign Discusses Changes to US Constitution


Texas Governor and Republican presidential contender Rick Perry has signed a pledge vowing to support a Constitutional amendment declaring marriage to be a union of one man and one woman, the group sponsoring the pledge said on Friday.

The pledge also includes a vow to support the Defense of Marriage Act in court, appoint judges and an Attorney General who will respect “the original meaning of the Constitution,” and appoint a presidential commission to investigate harassment of “traditional marriage” supporters.

Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, among those competing with Perry for Republican presidential nomination, have also signed the pledge, the group said.

Rick Perry’s campaign is now distancing him from another controversial claim in his book: That we should repeal the 16th Amendment and replace it with a “Fair Tax,” a radical idea that’s still rattling around in some precincts on the right.

Perry’s book, published in the fall of 2010, offered a range of policy prescriptions to deal with the problems he thinks are associated with the income tax. He proposed two alternatives: The first was to scrap the current tax code in favor of a “flat tax” to make taxation “simpler, easier to follow, and harder to manipulate.”

The second, more controversial, proposal Perry advanced in the book was to “repeal the 16th Amendment” and “then pursue an alternative model of taxation such as a national sales tax or the Fair Tax.” He called the 16th Amendment “the great milestone on the road to serfdom” because it represented “the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States.”

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