Convention to propose amendment to U.S. Constitution
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Besides the more common method of amending the United States Constitution, there is an option to assemble a national convention to propose one or more amendments to that document. Article V of the Constitution requires the Congress to "call a convention" to propose one or more constitutional amendments whenever two-thirds of the state legislatures "apply" for such a convention. With 50 states presently in the Union, there must be applications made by lawmakers in at least 34 states in order to trigger this alternative procedure. The convention to propose an amendment (or amendments) has no ratification powers—it may only draft and propose the amendment(s), which then must be ratified either by the state legislatures or by smaller conventions conducted within the individual states.
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Purpose
The framers of the Constitution wanted a means of sometimes bypassing a potentially recalcitrant Congress in the amendment-proposing process. They knew that there would be circumstances in which Congress, for self-serving reasons, would ignore valid pleas to amend the Constitution and so the framers established an alternate means of proposing change in the Constitution.
History
All of the twenty-seven amendments of the Constitution were proposed by Congress—never have the legislatures of enough states applied to Congress to call a national convention to propose an amendment on the same subject. While there have been applications addressed to Congress from the nation's beginning to the 1990s—and from legislators in all but one of the 50 states—Congress has never responded by calling a convention because those applications requested amendments on different subjects. This Congressional inaction has contributed to setting the precedent that the applications from two-thirds of the state legislatures must petition for the same amendment(s).
However, in three instances, state lawmakers have come very close to triggering a national convention:
- Only one more state was needed to call a convention for an amendment to mandate direct election of U.S. Senators. But the subsequent adoption of the 17th Amendment made it moot.
- During the 1960s, when state legislators were concerned about the United States Supreme Court's state legislative reapportionment decisions in Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders, had there been applications from the legislatures of just two more states, this alternate procedure for proposing a federal constitutional amendment would have been triggered.
- Likewise, during the 1970s and 1980s, only two additional applications were lacking to invoke the process of a national convention to draft and propose a federal constitutional amendment requiring the budget of the United States government to be balanced, except during time of war.
The legislatures of 49 states have, at various times, applied to Congress for the calling of conventions to propose a host of different amendments. While numerous resolutions for this purpose have been offered by lawmakers there, Hawaii has never—at any time during its comparatively brief statehood—made such a request.
Possible scope
Constitutional scholars are deeply divided as to how a national, amendment-proposing convention would function procedurally and whether such a convention would be limited to the one subject for which it was summoned or whether it could stray far afield and expose the Constitution either to capricious, possibly dangerous, revision or whether the convention would have the power to simply discard the Constitution altogether and replace it with an entirely new document. It is worth noting that such an outcome would be similar to what happened when the convention assembled in 1787 ended up writing the current Constitution. That convention was gathered merely to revise the earlier Articles of Confederation, but chose instead to abandon the articles in favor of a completely new document.
Under the Constitution's necessary and proper clause, Congress could enact a statute to clearly define many of the currently ambiguous and debatable features of this procedure. Up through the 102nd Congress, it was quite routine for Senators and Representatives to offer legislation in both houses of Congress to end much of the disagreement surrounding the convention amendment-proposing alternative. However, in recent terms of Congress, those very same lawmakers, for example Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, have not re-introduced such legislation.
Recission of applications
The legislatures of some states have chosen to rescind their prior applications for an amendment-proposing, national convention, either out of fear of the possible results of such a convention, or because the reasons for the summoning such a convention were later rendered moot. Recent examples of recissions are:
- Alabama and Florida in 1988
- Louisiana in 1990
- Idaho and Oregon in 1999
- North Dakota and Utah in 2001
- Arizona in 2003
- Georgia and Virginia in 2004
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