At Law & Liberty, Robert G. Natelson: Busting the Myths About Article V Conventions. From the introduction:
aw & Liberty recently featured an excellent exchange between John Grove and Mark Pulliam on state nullification as a way to respond to federal overreach and infringements on liberty.
There is, however, an alternative. The Constitution’s Article V permits constitutional amendments through a state-based process of proposal and ratification. The Framers designed this procedure to enable the states to bypass Congress while correcting or curbing a dysfunctional or abusive federal government.
State legislatures have initiated the procedure on many occasions. In 1788 and 1789, the legislatures of Virginia and New York initiated it to induce Congress to propose the Bill of Rights. Early in the twentieth century, a majority of states employed it to persuade the Senate to agree to the Seventeenth Amendment (direct election of senators). After World War II, states employed it to convince Congress to propose the Twenty-Second Amendment (presidential term limits).
Since that time, however, the federal government has become more dysfunctional and Congress more resistant to reform. Yet the states have never carried through the amendment process to completion.
In 2009, when I began to investigate this procedure, I started with the following hypotheses: that the 1787 Philadelphia convention was the only federal convention ever held; that Congress called it for the sole purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation; that by proposing a new Constitution, the convention “ran away”—i.e., exceeded its power; that an Article V “Convention for proposing Amendments” would be a constitutional convention untethered to the scope of its call; that its composition and protocols are unknown; and that courts rarely, if ever, had adjudicated Article V issues—if they were justiciable at all.
All of these hypotheses turned out to be glaringly false, and the evidence forced me to reject all of them. …
Posted at 6:25 AM