Reining in Congress: An Enforceable Balanced Budget Amendment
There is growing sentiment that one or more constitutional amendments may be necessary to rein in the runaway Congress. The principal mechanism the Founders built into the Constitution for such contingencies is the procedure in Article V by which two thirds of the state legislatures force what the Constitution calls a “Convention for proposing Amendments.” […]
Corrective Constitutional Amendments?
“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Without such means it might even risque the loss of that part of the constitution which it wished most religiously to preserve.” – Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), in 2 Select Works of Edmund Burke 108 […]
New paper summarizes rules for amending the Constitution
Our sister institution, The Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona has just published my paper, Amending the Constitution by Convention: Practical Guidance for Citizens and Policymakers. Using my prior research and new findings, it summarizes the rules you should use in drafting Article V applications, answering objections, heading off congressional interference, and so forth. As I’ve […]
Amendments Convention: Answering Those Not-So-Tough Questions
Are you a state lawmaker or reform advocate challenged to answer “tough questions” about a Convention for Proposing Amendments? If so, here are some answers. Recently I traveled to Indianapolis to testify before the Indiana legislature. While there, I learned that opponents of an amendments convention are circulating questions about a convention, apparently designed to […]
Madison being misread (on an amendments convention)
Sometimes even friends of the Constitution misinterpret the document or the history surrounding it. Throughout the country right now, state lawmakers are advancing constitutional amendments to restrain federal power and federal spending. Because they know that Congress will never propose amendments to restrain itself (2/3 of both the Senate and House would have to approve […]
How to amend the Constitution safely and without Congress — according to the Founders
“How to” Issue Papers on obtaining needed constitutional amendments without the consent of Congress.
Was the Constitutional Convention a “Runaway?”
[Rob Natelson is the author of The Original Constitution: What It Really Said and Meant – an objective explanation of the Constitution as understood by the Founders.] There’s an old accusation leveled against the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The Convention was a very long time ago, so the accusation shouldn’t matter any more. […]
Twenty Legal Rules for Conventions for Proposing Amendments
(To learn more about this topic, listen Justin Longo’s interview with Rob Natelson — “What Would an Article V Convention Look Like?“) This is the third in a series of three articles about the Constitution’s OTHER method of constitutional amendment – that is, rather than the amendment coming from Congress, the states force a “convention […]
How would a convention for proposing amendments work?
Last week I reported on the growing movement to “save the Constitution by amending it” – the much-precedented process of amending the Constitution to push the government back toward Founding-Era principles. Previous amendments have been proposed by Congress, and ratified by the states. But I noted that Congress is unlikely to propose amendments to limit […]
Amending the Constitution to Save It
To learn more: hear a podcast of “amending the Constitution to save it” at https://ivoices.org/. During the previous year or so there has been more and more interest in the idea of “amending the U.S. Constitution to save it.” Several websites are now devoted to that idea. One illustration is the site entitled “10 Amendments […]
