The History and Future of Article V: A Conversation vol. 2

Convention of States Co-Founders Mark Meckler and Michael Farris recently reunited for a trip down memory lane, recounting the rich history of the grassroots Article V movement and laying out their vision for its future. For newcomers and seasoned COS veterans alike, we trust you will find this conversation informative and inspiring. We’re excited to share the full transcript of their discussion, published in several parts, exclusively on the COS blog!

Read part one here!

Mark Meckler: Amazingly, the way Mike and I met was through a mutual friend, and his name is Tim Dunn. Tim is one of the founding board members [of] Citizens for Self-Governance, one of the reasons that we have the Convention of States Project.

And really, I gotta give credit where it's due. It’s really Tim's wife, Terry, that said, you know, Mark and Mike really ought to meet. And so, Tim Dunn, a dear friend of both of ours, introduced us, and you pitched me on the idea of Convention of States. You spent about an hour on the phone with me, and I was immediately in.

And I want people to understand why I was so in and so fast. First, I was looking, like you, for a fix because I had been one of the leaders of the Tea Party movement. And what I saw is electing people wasn’t enough. And I was worried about the future of our country for my kids. At the time, my kids were probably, I wanna say, 12 or 13 and 15, and so I'm looking forward to their future, and I'm seeing things not going well and not going well after an excellent election. And so I’m thinking, OK, well, if that's not enough, I just poured my entire life, literally my life savings into all of that, and it didn't fix the problem. So now what?

And so I’m looking for a fix. I'm a business guy. Unlike you, I'm not a scholar. I've built a bunch of businesses, and so that's how I think of things. It's a problem; it needs a solution. You gotta have a business plan. And one of the things that you did that was so amazing to me — it wasn't just an idea. When I talked to a lot of scholars, Mike, I think you're very different. I think part of the reason you're different is because you've been engaged in politics. You ran for lieutenant governor. You really understand systems. You're not just theoretical. You had actually designed a way that not only could you explain Article V, but you could explain how we could get it done.

And one of the most fascinating things and interesting things to me was I had this network from the tea party, you had a network from the homeschool movement, and we're able, to some extent, to combine those and think, OK, we could probably build a grassroots army out of this and get this done. Mike also had expertise in real grassroots politics. So, he understood this was gonna take a muscular grassroots effort. A lot of people who come up with ideas, they don't really understand grassroots. They know it's gonna take a lot of people. They have no idea how to do grassroots. You actually are a pioneer in a grassroots movement. So you understood all that.

So now, here we are, it's 11 years later. At this point, we’ve passed 19 states. It's been hard. One of the things you said early on that helps me to keep perspective is you spent 25 years pushing the homeschooling movement. I know it's hard, and I know it takes a long time.

I wanna talk about the objections and the things that keep people from going along with this idea.

And by people, I mean people who should be on our side — some conservatives. And the primary argument that I hear — this is 90% of the objection — is that if we call a convention, we're gonna have a runaway convention and we're gonna lose our Constitution. And so I wanna start at step one of, where do people say that comes from? The people who say they have some basis for this, say in 1787, these great founding fathers got together for a convention and that their only purpose in gathering was to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. But that that convention ran away, they disobeyed what they were told to do, and they gave us this new Constitution, including a new ratification method.

And it's the weirdest argument to me, Mike. And I know you find this as offensive as I do. They say they're incredible guys, they gave us this wonderful gift, but it was all illegal. They were a bunch of criminals and scalawags.

That's the argument that gets made, and I know that frustrated you so much. I remember you said at one point to me, Mark, I'm gonna spend the entire summer face down in the library, and I'm gonna push back on this idea that 1787 was a runaway convention. Can you talk about that process and what you found?

Michael Farris: Sure. Well, you have to start the story at the Annapolis Convention. A handful of states met — it was about five states [that] met. Their purpose was to discuss problems of commerce. Commerce in those days meant trade across state lines, and it's what it still should be from the constitutional perspective.

They got together and realized two things. First, they don't have enough authority. The states had called them there. The states had given their instructions, and they didn't have enough authority. They weren't about to violate the authority given to them by the states. And so they said, well, let’s come back again in Philadelphia in May of 1787, and let's ask our states for authority to do this, and their recommendation was to render the federal constitution adequate for the exigencies of the Union.

Now, the language ‘only amend the Articles of Confederation’ comes from a completely different source. It comes from the Congress that was meeting under the Articles of Confederation. Now, if anybody would bother to read the Articles of Confederation, you'd realize that Congress didn't have any power to do anything implied at all. That was one of the problems. They had no powers that were commensurate to the things that they needed to face. There were no implied powers, no powers to call a convention. They did not call a convention; the states called the convention.

And so it started with Virginia.

To be continued…

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