There is something fundamentally strange about hearing an Article V Convention of States described as though it were some clever loophole discovered by political activists looking for a way around the Constitution. Article V is not hidden in a footnote, buried in an obscure federal statute, or constructed from an aggressive interpretation of a vague constitutional clause. It is written directly into the Constitution of the United States. It was debated by the generation that drafted the Constitution, defended during ratification, and deliberately preserved as one of only two methods by which constitutional amendments can be proposed. I support using it because I do not believe the federal government should possess an effective monopoly over the reform of the federal government itself. When Washington has accumulated enormous power, enormous debt, and enormous institutional permanence, it is unreasonable to insist that the only legitimate reforms are those Washington voluntarily chooses to impose upon itself. The Constitution does not say that. In fact, Article V was written precisely so that it would not be true.
Article V establishes two separate methods for proposing amendments to the Constitution. Congress may propose amendments when two-thirds of both houses agree, which is the route through which every ratified amendment in American history has so far been proposed. The Constitution, however, also provides a second route. When the legislatures of two-thirds of the states submit applications, Congress is required to call a convention for proposing amendments. With fifty states, that threshold is thirty-four. Any amendment proposed through that convention would still face the same immense ratification requirement imposed on amendments proposed by Congress. Three-fourths of the states, currently thirty-eight, would have to ratify it before it became part of the Constitution. That distinction matters because an Article V convention does not possess the power to rewrite the Constitution by itself. It is not a sovereign assembly with the authority to impose a new governmental order upon the country. It is a convention for proposing amendments. The convention may propose. The states still decide. No amendment becomes law unless thirty-eight states ultimately agree to it. That is not a loophole. That is constitutional federalism.
The state-initiated amendment process was not an accidental feature of the Constitution. It was not a drafting mistake that somehow survived the Philadelphia Convention. Its purpose was discussed directly by the Framers. George Mason raised a concern that remains remarkably relevant today. If Congress possessed complete control over the amendment process, what would happen when Congress itself became part of the problem requiring correction? Why would an institution voluntarily surrender power, limit its own authority, or approve constitutional reforms directed against its own institutional interests? Mason understood that a constitutional system requiring Congress to initiate every amendment would leave the federal government with an extraordinary degree of control over attempts to restrain federal power. The solution was to preserve another avenue through the states. That became the Article V convention mechanism.
The logic is not difficult to understand. Ask Congress voluntarily to impose meaningful restrictions upon congressional tenure. Ask the federal establishment voluntarily to surrender powers accumulated over generations. Ask Washington voluntarily to construct constitutional barriers against its own spending habits, administrative expansion, regulatory reach, and political advantages. Individual members of Congress may sincerely support such reforms, but institutions tend to protect themselves. Political systems develop constituencies around existing power. Bureaucracies resist contraction. Elected officials rarely surrender authority without external pressure. The Framers understood these realities before the modern administrative state even existed, and they designed a mechanism that allowed constitutional reform to originate outside Congress.
James Madison explained in Federalist No. 43 that the amendment process was designed so that both the national government and the states could originate constitutional corrections when experience revealed defects in the existing system. Alexander Hamilton was even more explicit in Federalist No. 85 when he discussed the state application process. Hamilton emphasized that once the required number of states acted, Congress would be obligated to call the convention. The constitutional language says Congress “shall call a convention,” not that Congress may call one if it finds the idea politically convenient. The mechanism was designed to operate independently of congressional enthusiasm. That matters because the power of Article V lies precisely in its ability to move constitutional reform beyond the control of the federal institutions that might have the least incentive to accept it.
This is why I support a Convention of States. The contemporary movement has focused on several broad categories of reform, including fiscal restraints on the federal government, limitations on federal power and jurisdiction, and term limits for federal officials and members of Congress. Those are not revolutionary objectives in the destructive sense of the word. They are attempts to use constitutional machinery to address structural problems through constitutional means. There is a profound difference between rejecting the constitutional system and invoking a procedure expressly authorized by that system. One operates outside constitutional authority. The other operates inside it. One attempts to substitute raw political force for constitutional legitimacy. The other requires overwhelming agreement among the states before anything can change.
The threshold itself demonstrates how difficult Article V is to use. Thirty-four state legislatures must agree sufficiently to trigger the convention process. A convention may then propose amendments, but it cannot ratify those amendments. Thirty-eight states must ultimately approve a proposal before it becomes part of the Constitution. A proposal opposed by only thirteen states cannot be ratified. That is an extraordinarily demanding standard. It means a constitutional amendment cannot realistically be imposed by one narrow ideological faction, one temporary political majority, one president, or one congressional coalition. It requires broad and geographically distributed national agreement. The structure deliberately makes constitutional change difficult because constitutional change should be difficult. Article V was designed to make reform possible without making the Constitution unstable.
The broader debate also reveals a strange modern assumption that constitutional legitimacy flows downward from Washington, as though the federal government created the states and therefore possesses superior authority over the entire constitutional structure. That is not how the American system was built. The federal government is itself a creation of the Constitution. The states are not administrative subdivisions created by Congress. They are constituent governments within a federal system, possessing their own legislatures, constitutions, courts, executives, and political legitimacy. Article V reflects that structure by giving both the federal government and the states a role in constitutional amendment. Congress has one path to proposing amendments. The states have another path through applications for a convention. Neither side can unilaterally alter the Constitution because amendment still requires extraordinary ratification support.
That is not evidence of a defect in the Constitution. It is evidence of careful constitutional engineering. The Framers divided legislative power between two houses of Congress. They divided federal authority among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. They divided sovereignty between the federal government and the states. They also created more than one point of origin for constitutional amendments. The entire structure reflects suspicion of concentrated power. Article V fits naturally within that design because it prevents Congress from possessing exclusive control over the constitutional reform process.
The strongest objection to a Convention of States is the fear of what critics describe as a runaway convention. That argument deserves a serious response. No Article V convention for proposing amendments has ever actually occurred, so important procedural questions remain unresolved. Scholars debate how applications should be counted, how delegates would be selected, what voting rules would apply, how the convention could be limited to particular subjects, what authority Congress would possess over the process, and how disputes might be resolved if delegates attempted to exceed the scope contemplated by the states. Those are legitimate legal and procedural questions, and anyone who supports an Article V convention should take them seriously. Constitutional reform should never be approached casually.
However, uncertainty about the operation of a constitutional mechanism that has never been used does not make the mechanism illegitimate. More importantly, the runaway convention argument often skips over the most important safeguard in the entire process: the convention cannot ratify its own proposals. Even if delegates proposed something far outside the expectations of the states, those proposals would still have to survive the ratification process. Imagine the worst possible scenario. Imagine delegates become ambitious, disregard instructions, and propose sweeping changes that most Americans never expected. They still cannot put those changes into the Constitution by themselves. Thirty-eight states would have to ratify them. Thirteen states could block them completely. That is an enormous constitutional firewall.
The existence of unresolved procedural questions should therefore lead to careful preparation, not automatic surrender of a constitutional power. States can debate delegate instructions, selection rules, recall procedures, transparency requirements, voting structures, subject limitations, and the relationship between applications before a convention is ever assembled. Courts and legislatures may also confront difficult questions as the process develops. None of that changes the simple fact that Article V expressly authorizes the states to initiate the process. The appropriate response to constitutional uncertainty is to define procedures as carefully as possible, not to declare an entire clause of the Constitution too dangerous to use.
It is also important to separate the concept of an Article V convention from support for every amendment that might eventually emerge from one. I can support the mechanism without automatically supporting every proposal. That is how constitutional self-government is supposed to work. The convention should be allowed to propose reforms. The public should scrutinize them aggressively. State legislatures or state ratifying conventions should debate them. Bad amendments should be rejected. Good amendments should be ratified. Supporting Article V does not require suspending judgment. It requires accepting the legitimacy of the process.
The modern Convention of States effort has already demonstrated that this is not merely an academic discussion. Multiple state legislatures have adopted applications seeking a convention focused on fiscal restraints, limits on federal power and jurisdiction, and term limits. The movement has not yet reached the thirty-four-state threshold required to trigger the convention process, but the number of states participating makes clear that dissatisfaction with federal power is not confined to a handful of activists. The difficulty of reaching thirty-four states also demonstrates how intentionally demanding Article V is. A petition cannot trigger a convention. A president cannot order one. A congressional majority cannot create one by ordinary legislation. A wealthy donor cannot simply purchase an amendment. The process requires sustained legislative agreement across a large portion of the country. That difficulty is a feature, not a flaw.
The larger argument for a Convention of States comes down to a basic question: do Americans still believe constitutional power can legitimately be used to restrain entrenched federal institutions when those institutions have little incentive to restrain themselves? I believe the answer must be yes. The federal debt has grown to levels that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. Federal agencies exercise regulatory authority across enormous areas of economic and private life. Congress has delegated vast amounts of policymaking authority to administrative institutions. The national political class has become increasingly permanent, professionalized, and insulated from ordinary life. Americans can disagree about how serious each of these problems is, but they are legitimate subjects of constitutional debate.
If the states conclude that some of these problems require structural reform, they should not be told that the only acceptable path is to ask Washington for permission to restrain Washington. That is exactly the institutional conflict Article V was designed to address. Congress should not be the sole gatekeeper of amendments concerning congressional power. Federal institutions should not be granted an unwritten veto over constitutional reforms aimed at federal institutions. The state convention process exists because the Framers understood that there could come a time when reform would have to originate somewhere other than the federal government.
There is also an important philosophical point that is often lost in this discussion. The Constitution was not designed to make the federal government untouchable. It was designed to make government accountable to a constitutional structure. The Constitution has already been amended twenty-seven times. Some amendments expanded rights. Some altered elections. Some changed the relationship between citizens and government. One amendment even repealed another. Constitutional amendment is not an act of hostility toward the Constitution. The amendment process is part of the Constitution.
The irony, therefore, is difficult to miss. Opponents sometimes argue that an Article V convention threatens the Constitution, yet Article V is itself part of the Constitution. The procedure exists because the Framers understood that no generation could foresee every future problem and because they understood that the federal government itself might someday become the institution requiring correction. They refused to give Congress exclusive authority over constitutional reform. They left another route open through the states.
I support a Convention of States because I do not believe constitutional restraint should depend entirely upon Washington developing the willingness to restrain itself. I support serious fiscal restraints. I support examining constitutional limits on the expansion of federal jurisdiction. I support a serious national debate over term limits and the development of a permanent political class. Most importantly, I support pursuing those questions through the lawful constitutional machinery created for exactly this purpose.
An Article V convention should be approached carefully. Its procedures should be scrutinized. Its delegates should be accountable. Its scope should be debated. Its proposals should be examined sentence by sentence. No amendment should be ratified simply because it carries the label of reform. Constitutional change demands precision, restraint, and overwhelming public legitimacy. But caution is not the same thing as paralysis, and unresolved procedural questions are not the same thing as constitutional illegitimacy.
The Constitution does not belong exclusively to Congress. It does not belong to federal agencies, federal courts, political parties, presidents, lobbyists, bureaucracies, or permanent institutions in Washington. The constitutional system reserves a role for the states because the states remain part of the architecture of the Republic. Article V preserves that role in unmistakable language.
A Convention of States is not an escape hatch from the Constitution. It is not a trick. It is not an attack on constitutional government. It is not a loophole. It is one of the corrective mechanisms the Framers deliberately placed inside the Constitution so that the federal government would never become the sole judge of whether the federal government should be reformed. If enough states decide that Washington requires structural restraint, they possess every constitutional right to use the mechanism the Constitution itself gives them.