The Independent View: A Convention for Proposing Amendments

Harvard Law School professor and activist Lawrence Lessig has written in the Atlantic an article titled "A Real Step To Fix Democracy".

In January, Gallup found that Americans from across the political spectrum picked the failure of “government” as the top problem facing America today. The vast majority link that failure to the influence of money in politics. Yet more than 90 percent of us don’t see how that influence could be reduced. Washington won’t fix itself, so who else could fix it?

It turns out the framers of our Constitution thought about this problem precisely. Two days before the Constitution was complete, they noticed a bug. In the version they were considering, only Congress could propose amendments to the Constitution. That led Virginia’s George Mason to ask, what if Congress itself was the problem?

It was an obvious flaw, and it led the drafters to add a second path to amendment that Congress couldn’t control: If 34 states demand it, Congress must call “a convention for proposing Amendments.”

CLICK HERE to read the article.

He concludes:

That is the convention’s role: to provide an alternative to Washington as the place where our nation’s constitutional problems can be addressed and possibly solved.

The framers of our Constitution picked state legislators as the backstop for the republic. They gave them the duty to step up if Congress loses its capacity to govern.

That loss has happened. The American government has failed. The only question now is whether state legislatures will cower behind the “what ifs” or do their job.