On December 16, 1773, a group of colonists known as the Sons of Liberty boarded three English ships at Massachusetts’ Griffin Wharf. They pulled over 90,000 lbs of tea from the ships’ cargo holds and threw it into Boston Harbor in a symbolic act of protest history would remember as the Boston Tea Party.

The Tea Party was an key step in the course from resistance to Revolution in the American colonies. Less than a year after the event, the first Continental Congress presented the colonies’ British hegemons with a united American opposition — and, less than a year after that, the Revolutionary War had begun and the second Continental Congress, which would adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, had gone into session.

Fourteen years after Boston, America’s Constitutional Convention met to draft and ratify the document which governs our nation to this very day.

State Rep. Bob Smith (R-Watkinsville) hopes the modern day tea parties held in Atlanta and around the country last Friday in opposition to President Barack Obama’s budget, mortgage bailout, and “stimulus” proposals will help build momentum for a modern Constitutional Convention in a much shorter period of time.

As we first reported on Peach Pundit, Smith introduced a bill in January to “provide for the holding of a Convention of the people of Georgia for the purpose of proposing amendments to the Constitution of this state relating to state and local taxation and finance.”

The legislation, House Bill 250, provides for the election of delegates to a Constitutional Convention, and for the holding of that convention “in the City of Atlanta on the fourth Monday following the certification of the results of such elections by the Secretary of State.”

HB 250 is currently in subcommittee, but Rep. Smith is clearly hoping that grassroots activities like the Atlanta Tea Party will help build popular momentum for tax reform in the Peach State, and will motivate Georgians to get directly involved in managing and reforming their government’s revenue-generating efforts.

What do you think? Is a Constitutional Convention the answer — and is there enough of a pro-reform groundswell building in Atlanta and around the state and country to create real (as opposed to sloganeering) change?