Want an Article 5 Convention to change the Constitution? Here come the clowns | Anderson

My occasional annoyance with constitutional defects is pretty well-known. I believe that we’ve several major amendments that should be immediately passed, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

This thought-experiment is usually reasonable up to the point where the question has to be asked: “How will you get the states to approve this, exactly?”

How to get the people of the U.S., to somehow revise, change, warp, construe, modify or otherwise simply throw out something that has been part of the original document for hundreds of years? It’s surprising, given the heavy lifting, that the Constitution has actually been changed at all – much less 27 times – and 10 of those times (the “Bill of Rights”) within a few years of adoption.

How is it done?

The Annotated Constitution (U.S. Congress) tells us that: “Article V establishes two methods for proposing amendments to the Constitution. The first method requires both the House and Senate to propose a constitutional amendment by a vote of two-thirds of the Members present… Alternatively, Article V provides that Congress shall call a convention for proposing amendments upon the request of two-thirds of the state legislatures. This method of proposing amendments, which scholars have debated at length, has never been used.”

Thank heaven.  And flatly, I never really thought it would come up.

But it has.

Under cover. Stealth. Because I wasn’t paying attention, I guess. It would theoretically take 34 states to try to call such a convention, and according to “Common Cause,” there are 28 already signed on, in one way or another. All this through the efforts of a gang of lobbyists, with special projects of their own that they would like to see enacted: one favoring term limits for the U.S. Congress, another in favor of a balanced budget, a group organized nationally to support (undefined) “state’s rights,” and a special-interest group organized to fight, of all things, special interests (though it is unclear what this battle actually consists of).

Not that I have anything against these things, per se, but the fact is that a successful Article 5 Convention would be open to almost anything and could theoretically be run by almost anyone – the Constitution is not clear at all on these points.

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I suspect that the founders’ notion was that a few best and brightest types might meet after the 13 states (well, 2/3rds of their legislatures, anyway) called the thing into being, and that they’d hang out and fix a few things.  But there is no function in the Constitutional language that says it would be anything like that.

Flatly, the vision of a lurid clownfest such as one called for by Article 5 would be hilarious if it were not so dangerous.

A quick gaze from the left into the toxic river of current American Politics dredges up a blurry image of rabid Matt Gaetz clones running amok, repealing the bill of rights, legalizing bazookas for home protection, abolishing schools and universities and replacing them with mega-churches, and so on.

The nightmare from the right would be equally horrifying: an army of “squad” types banning the Bible, opening the floodgates to “immigrants” from foreign prisons and nuthouses, outlawing capitalism and so forth.

Whatever your particular horror, an Article 5 convention could, theoretically, make it reality.

Changing the Constitution is hard.  It’s supposed to be hard.  And no amendment has passed that has not been down a very rough and time-consuming road.  And that’s right. These things need careful consideration.

Even so, most of the actual changes to the constitution have been due process or clarifying amendments; a very few were massively important modifications. Calling an Article 5 convention is a stupefyingly idiotic “easy bake” of this critical process.

My final thought is an amendment of my own: We should be looking at crafting one that takes the language out of Article 5 that makes such a convention possible.

This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Article 5 constitutional convention would be a clown show | Anderson