The Convention of States at Twenty: Hope, Caution, and the Permanent Question of Who Governs

The Washington Examiner reports that twenty state legislatures have now passed the Convention of States resolution, Kansas being the most recent, in early 2026. The resolution is addressed to Congress and seeks an Article V convention limited to three subjects: fiscal restraints on the federal government, term limits on federal officers, and limits on the jurisdiction of the federal arm. Fourteen more states must follow before Congress is obliged to call the convention. That is the law as written; the politics are, as always, considerably more tangled.

I confess that the news moves something in me that I can only describe as republican sympathy. I argued, repeatedly and on principle, that the earth belongs to the living — that no generation ought to be permanently bound by the constitutional settlements of a prior one. I believed, and still believe, that a republic which cannot periodically reconsider its own foundations is a republic that has frozen the past into a kind of post-mortem tyranny over the present. The Framers wisely placed Article V in the document precisely because they knew themselves to be fallible. The Convention of States movement, whatever one thinks of its particular agenda, is using a legitimate constitutional mechanism. That is not a small thing.

And yet — the cautious side of my disposition insists on being heard. A constitutional convention is not a scalpel; it is something closer to surgery performed while the patient is awake and the operating room is crowded with interested parties. The resolution as reported by the Examiner purports to limit the convention to three subjects. Whether such a limitation is legally enforceable is a question I cannot answer with certainty from this remove, and I would mark as inference the assumption that a convened assembly of state delegates would necessarily confine itself to its stated mandate. History does not strongly support that confidence. The Philadelphia convention of 1787 was called merely to amend the Articles of Confederation; it produced an entirely new instrument of government. That outcome was, in my judgment, fortunate. The next such outcome might not be.

On the substance of the three proposed subjects, I can speak more directly. Fiscal restraint on the federal government — meaning, I take it, some form of constitutional limit on deficit spending and accumulated debt — is a cause I have championed in every form available to me. I held then, and hold now, that public debt incurred by one generation and left to the next is a species of tyranny: the dead binding the living without their consent. If a balanced-budget or debt-ceiling amendment, properly drafted, could enforce genuine restraint, the republic would be better for it. The devil, as always, lives in the drafting; an amendment written badly could disable the government's capacity to respond to genuine emergency. I mark that risk as real, not theoretical.

Term limits on federal officers present a more complicated picture. I valued rotation in office as a guard against the consolidation of power in permanent officeholders — what I once called an "aristocracy of wealth" settling into the machinery of government. At the same time, I respected the right of the people to choose whom they will. An amendment that removes a popular representative from eligibility overrides the will of the constituency that sent him. These two values are in genuine tension, and the convention delegates, if they ever assemble, will have to resolve it honestly.

Limits on federal jurisdiction I regard with the warmest sympathy of the three. The tendency of the federal government to expand its reach into every corner of civic life — commerce, education, local policing, the daily decisions of small holders and individual citizens — was a danger I warned against when the ink on the Constitution was barely dry. The states are the natural guardians of domestic liberty, close enough to the governed to be corrected by them. A federal government that has become, in practical effect, a national government without meaningful limit is precisely the concentrated power that the design of the Republic was meant to prevent.

My counsel, then, is this: the citizens who support this effort should press forward with clear eyes, demanding that any enabling legislation specify, with the greatest possible precision, the scope of the convention's mandate and the mechanism for enforcing that scope. The citizens who oppose it should engage the substance of the three proposals rather than merely denounce the process — for the process is constitutionally legitimate, and dismissing it without argument is itself a kind of contempt for self-government. And all citizens, on every side, should remember the first principle: governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That consent, properly deliberated and clearly expressed, is the only foundation on which any constitutional structure can safely rest.