A Convention of States Is the Founders' Safety Valve, Weighed Honestly

There is a door in the Constitution that has never been opened. It has a handle, hinges, and a sign over it in plain eighteenth-century English, and for more than two centuries the country has walked past it as though it were painted on the wall. Some conservatives want to open it. Other conservatives, just as patriotic and just as well read, are standing in front of it with their arms folded.

The door is the second half of Article V, the clause that lets the states call a convention for proposing amendments. This post gives both camps a fair hearing, because both deserve one, and then it argues a verdict. The verdict is that the Framers built this door on purpose, built strong locks on the far side of it, and meant for us to use it when Washington stopped listening. But you should see the case against first, stated the way its best defenders would state it.

What Article V actually says

Start with the words, because every argument about a convention eventually comes back to them. Article V reads:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress

Read it slowly and four things stand out.

1. There are two ways to propose an amendment: two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or a convention called on the application of two-thirds of the state legislatures.
2. There is one way to adopt an amendment, no matter who proposed it: ratification by three-fourths of the states, through their legislatures or through state conventions, whichever Congress chooses.
3. The verb attached to Congress in the convention route is "shall call." Not "may consider." Not "shall deem it wise." Shall.
4. The convention's job is "proposing Amendments." Not writing a new constitution. Not adopting anything. Proposing.

With fifty states, two-thirds is 34 applications (two-thirds of 50 is 33.33, and you cannot have a third of a legislature, so the threshold rounds up to 34). Three-fourths is 38 (three-fourths of 50 is 37.5, which rounds up to 38). Every one of the 27 amendments in the Constitution came through the first route, a proposal by Congress. The second route has never produced a convention. That is the door nobody has opened.

George Mason's objection on September 15, 1787

The convention route exists because one delegate refused to trust the national legislature with a monopoly on its own reform.

The draft of the amendment article that came out of the Committee of Style had Congress doing all the proposing. Congress would propose amendments when two-thirds of both houses thought it necessary, or when two-thirds of the state legislatures applied for it. Either way, Congress held the pen. On September 15, 1787, two days before the signing, George Mason of Virginia objected. As Madison recorded it, Mason argued that because proposing amendments would depend, in both modes, on Congress, no amendments of the proper kind would ever be obtained by the people if the government became oppressive, which Mason believed it would.

Think about how sharp that is. Mason was not worried that Congress would propose bad amendments. He was worried that Congress would refuse to propose the amendments that restrain Congress. No institution volunteers for a diet. Gouverneur Morris and Elbridge Gerry then moved to require a convention on the application of two-thirds of the states, and the delegates agreed. The final text took shape in the last working days of the Convention, and it took shape precisely to answer the problem we would describe today as a federal government that will not reform itself.

Mason still refused to sign on September 17. His other objections, including the lack of a bill of rights, are a story for George Mason Refused to Sign, and His Objections Became the Bill of Rights. But the state route in Article V is his monument as much as anything in the Bill of Rights.

Madison defended the finished article in Federalist 43, and his sentence on it is worth memorizing:

It guards equally against that extreme facility, which would render the Constitution too mutable; and that extreme difficulty, which might perpetuate its discovered faults.

And then, crucially, Madison added that the article equally enables the general and the state governments to originate the amendment of errors. Equally. The Framers did not treat the state route as an emergency exit for cranks. They treated it as a coequal half of the design. Hamilton was even more direct in Federalist 85, where he answered critics who feared the national rulers would block reform:

We may safely rely on the disposition of the State legislatures to erect barriers against the encroachments of the national authority.

The strongest case against a convention

Now the other side, and I will give it its full weight, because the people who make it are not cowards or establishment hacks. Some of the oldest grassroots conservative organizations in the country, including the John Birch Society and Eagle Forum, have opposed a convention for decades. Their case, at its strongest, runs like this.

First, nobody knows the rules. Article V says nothing about how delegates are chosen, how many each state sends, whether each state gets one vote or votes by population, who presides, or what counts as a quorum. A convention would write its own rules, and an assembly that writes its own rules is an assembly that can do what it likes.

Second, the precedent is bad. The only national convention America ever held was called by the Confederation Congress on February 21, 1787 "for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation." It threw the Articles out and wrote a new government. If the Framers themselves ran away with their commission, why trust a convention of modern politicians to stay inside theirs?

Third, the times are wrong. The Constitution's defenders today are a minority in the culture and in the academy. Open the document to amendment and the other side, with its money, its lawyers and its press coverage, may bring amendments of its own: rewrite the Second Amendment, abolish the Electoral College, gut the speech clause.

Fourth, the problem is not the text. The Constitution already forbids most of what Washington does. A government that ignores Article I will ignore a new amendment too. The cure is to elect people who obey the document we have.

That is a serious argument. I want to take each point in order.

Answering the objections, one at a time

One: the rules are unwritten, but the outcome is not. It is true that Article V leaves procedure open. It is also true that procedure cannot change the one rule that matters: nothing a convention proposes becomes law until 38 states ratify it. A convention has no power to adopt anything. It can propose an amendment abolishing the Senate, or one declaring the moon a federal enclave, and the effect is precisely zero until three-fourths of the states agree. The ratification wall is the lock on the far side of the door, and it is the same wall that stands behind every amendment Congress proposes. Nobody argues Congress should never propose amendments because it might propose a bad one.

Think about what the runaway scenario actually requires. A convention would have to propose a radical amendment outside its call, and then 38 state legislatures, or 38 state conventions, would have to ratify it. Just 13 states can block anything. Take a map of the country, find the thirteen most conservative states, and ask whether a proposal to repeal the Second Amendment gets past them. If it does, the country has already changed so much that the Second Amendment was going to be in trouble with or without a convention.

Two: 1787 is the wrong precedent. The Philadelphia delegates did exceed the Confederation Congress's resolution. But look at how. They wrote a document that the Articles' own amendment rule could not have adopted, and then they sent it to the people under a new ratification rule, Article VII, that the Articles never contemplated. Madison spends much of Federalist 40 defending exactly that move. The difference today is that the ratification rule is fixed in the Constitution itself. A modern convention cannot rewrite Article V's three-fourths requirement and then use the new rule to ratify its work, because the existing Article V governs how any change takes effect, and every state official who would count ratifications has sworn an oath under Article VI to support the existing Constitution. The 1787 delegates had no such constraint, because the Articles had no such mechanism. Their "runaway" is a lesson in why the Framers locked the door from the other side.

There is a further check most critics skip. The states that apply control the commission they send. A state legislature can instruct its delegates, limit them to the subject named in the application, and recall them. Several states have passed laws declaring that a delegate who votes outside the limited subject forfeits the post. Whether those laws would hold in every circumstance is an open question, and honesty requires saying so. But they are a real constraint that the 1787 delegates did not face.

Three: the times are always wrong for someone. This objection proves too much. If conservatives should never use Article V while the culture leans left, then the federal government grows without limit, because the culture does not swing back on its own and Congress will never propose amendments to restrain itself. That is exactly the scenario Mason predicted. And the arithmetic of ratification favors restraint, not radicalism. A convention route that requires 38 states is structurally harder for a coastal majority to use than a single act of Congress or a single five-justice opinion. The other side does not need a convention to change the Constitution's meaning. It has been doing that through the courts and the agencies for ninety years. The convention is the one forum where small and middle states hold the whip hand.

Four: the text matters more than critics admit. It is true that Washington ignores much of the Constitution already. But some limits work precisely because they are written in plain, mechanical language. The Twenty-Second Amendment limits a president to two elected terms, and since its ratification in 1951 every president has left on schedule. Nobody has needed a law review article to explain the age requirement for senators. Clear, structural rules get obeyed. Vague grants of power get stretched. An amendment requiring a balanced budget except in a declared war, or setting term limits for members of Congress, is the mechanical kind. You can read our longer treatment in a balanced budget amendment, the case for it and the conservative doubts and Term Limits Work for Presidents, So Why Not for Members of Congress.

The convention route already works without meeting

Here is a historical point that both sides sometimes forget. The convention route has shaped the Constitution even though no convention has ever met.

In the decades before 1913, state legislatures, frustrated that the Senate kept killing proposals for the direct election of senators, sent application after application for a convention on the subject. The count approached the two-thirds threshold. Historians commonly credit that pressure with persuading the Senate, whose members were the people least eager to change how senators were chosen, to propose what became the Seventeenth Amendment itself. Congress preferred to write the amendment rather than let a convention write it.

The same mechanism showed up again in the balanced-budget drive of the 1970s and 1980s, when the number of state applications came within a few states of the threshold. That drive did not produce an amendment, but it did produce years of serious debate in Congress about spending limits. The lesson is that a credible convention threat moves Congress. That is what Mason wanted: not a standing convention, but a lever.

I would argue the Seventeenth Amendment is a cautionary tale in its own right, since it cut state legislatures out of the Senate and removed one of federalism's best defenses. But that cuts toward the convention, not against it. Once the states lost their seat in the Senate, Article V's application route became nearly the only formal tool the states have left to check Washington as states.

The honest list of open questions

A fair post has to admit what nobody knows. Here are the questions that remain unsettled, because no convention has ever met and no court has ever ruled on them directly.

• Aggregation. Must 34 applications ask for the same subject, or do applications on different subjects add up? Most supporters and most scholars think a convention must be called for a common subject, but Congress has never said so in law.
• Rescission. Can a state withdraw its application? Several states have voted to rescind old applications. Whether those rescissions count would likely end up in Congress's hands, and possibly the courts'.
• Staleness. Does an application from 1979 still count today? Article V names no time limit.
• Voting at the convention. The tradition from the interstate conventions of the founding era is one state, one vote. That is how the 1787 Convention voted. But it is a tradition, not a text.
• Congress's role. Congress must call the convention and must choose the mode of ratification. Could it attach conditions to the call? Could it refuse? The text says "shall," and a Congress that defied it would be defying an express command of the Constitution. But there is no obvious court order to make a legislature act.

These are real questions. None of them changes the 38-state lock. Every scenario, however messy, ends at the same wall.

What the Founding asks of us

Step back from the procedure and ask the basic question: where does sovereignty lie? The Declaration says governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed," and that when a government becomes destructive of its ends, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." The Founders spent the next eleven years building a way to alter government without the abolishing part. Article V is that way. It is the peaceful, lawful, constitutional answer to the question of what free people do when their government outgrows its charter.

There is something a little odd about conservatives who revere the Framers' design and then treat one of its two amendment routes as too dangerous to touch. The Framers did not include decorative clauses. They included the state route because they expected a day when Congress would not reform itself, and they wanted the states to have a remedy short of revolution. Madison's word in Federalist 43 was "equally." If we take the original meaning seriously for the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, we have to take it seriously here.

That does not mean any convention, on any subject, with any rules. The prudent course is a limited call: applications that name one subject or a short list of related ones, delegates chosen by the legislatures and bound by state law to that subject, and a public, transparent proceeding. That is a convention built to be boring, which is exactly what a convention ought to be.

The verdict

Weigh it honestly. The fears are reasonable, but each one runs into the same fact: a convention proposes and the states dispose. The risks are procedural and therefore manageable; the risk of never using the tool is structural and grows every year. Washington has a forty-trillion-dollar balance on the national debt clock, and the Treasury's own figures show the public debt rising from $38.05 trillion on November 4, 2025 to $40.56 trillion on November 5, 2026, an increase of $2.51 trillion in a single year. You do not have to believe a convention will fix that to see that the current method of fixing it is not working.

The case for a convention is not that it is safe in every imaginable world. It is that the Framers judged it safer than leaving the national government as the sole judge of its own limits, and they were right. For a fuller exchange between the two camps, see Should Conservatives Call a Convention of States? Both Sides of Article V, and for the mechanics of an application, How a State Legislature Applies for an Article V Convention, Step by Step.

The case in brief

1. Article V gives two-thirds of the state legislatures, 34 of 50, the power to make Congress call a convention for proposing amendments; George Mason won that route on September 15, 1787 because Congress would never propose limits on itself.
2. A convention can only propose. Nothing becomes part of the Constitution without ratification by 38 states, and 13 states can block any proposal.
3. The runaway fear rests on 1787, but the 1787 delegates escaped a document with no workable amendment rule; a modern convention is bound by Article V itself and by delegates' instructions from their states.
4. The open questions (aggregation, rescission, voting rules) are real, and a limited, single-subject call is the prudent way to answer them.
5. A tool the Framers called equal to the congressional route should be used carefully, not abandoned.

What you can do: read Article V aloud on the site's Constitution page, then ask your state legislator in writing whether your state has an active Article V application and on what subject.