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By Root 974 0

though it has never happened, however, a constitutional convention is the one final plausible strategy for forcing fundamental reform onto our Congress.9 It is also the most viable grass-roots strategy for forcing reform onto the system. It’s going to be easier to organize movements within the states to demand fundamental reform than it will be to organize Congress to vote for any particular amendment to the Constitution to effect that reform. And more important, it’s going to be much easier to get a conversation about fundamental reform going in the context of a call for a convention than it will be through any other plausible political means.

The reason is an important strategic opportunity that a call for a convention would offer and that a demand for an amendment would not: different souls with different objectives could agree on the need for a convention without agreeing on the particular proposals that a convention should recommend. Some might want an amendment to give the president line-item-veto power. Some might want a balanced-budget amendment. Some might want term limits. Some might want to abolish the Electoral College, or ban political gerrymandering. And some might want to demand a system for funding elections that restores integrity and independence to Congress (me!).

All of these different souls could agree at least on the need to create the platform upon which their different ideas could be debated. That platform is the convention. And if the convention then recommended some of these changes, those changes would be sent to Congress to be sent to the states for the purpose of ratification. They would remain invalid, mere “propos[als],” until they were ratified by thirty-eight states.

Thirty-eight states. That is an almost impossibly large proportion of America—so large as to offer the first best reason that we should not fear this process. There are easily thirteen red states and thirteen blue states in America today. One chamber in each of thirteen states is enough to block any amendment. Neither side needs to fear that the other is going to run away with our Constitution.

Instead, in my view, this process could well give America the single best hope for a sustained conversation about what changes this democracy needs to restore integrity and trust to the system. The many months that it would take to build a movement within the states would give citizens in each of these states a chance to think about why such reform is necessary. The furious intensity of debate that would be directed against the very idea of a convention would make it almost impossible for any thinking American to miss what was at stake. And then the convention itself could provide a remarkable opportunity—if properly structured—for real reform to be considered and debated. There is no other process that could come close, in my view, to exciting the attention this issue needs and the reflection and deliberation it deserves.

Yet the convention is reviled by scholars and by insiders on the Left and Right alike. The process, they insist, is too uncertain. Too dangerous. A convention once convened could “run away,”10 these scholars say (to where, exactly?). The whole process is just too radical and untested for a mature and stable democracy.

This campaign against a constitutional convention is motivated by principle as well as by politics.11 There are some who are genuinely fearful of the uncertainty that such a procedure would raise. But as I will explain, the danger motivating that fear is completely avoidable. Others are not interested in avoiding that danger, because their real objection is political: the strongest movements for a convention in our lifetime have been movements from the Right. The most recent of these was a call for a convention to require a balanced budget. By 1989, thirty-two states had petitioned Congress to make that call (two short), before Alabama rescinded its petition and the movement apparently died.12

What’s clear, however, is that the Framers intended the convention clause to address precisely the problem