For those who are not very familiar with the U.S. Constitution or have just vague memories of it from civics class, hearing about an Article V Convention of States may be confusing.
Fear not, for we shall explore it together here in simpler terms. The United States Constitution is a mere 4,500 words broken into sections called Articles.
Article I describes the formation, selection, and powers of the legislative branch of our republic, vested in a Congress with two houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Article II describes the powers of an executive branch entrusted to a President and other officers deemed important to it.
Article III establishes a judicial branch vested primarily in a Supreme Court. Together these first three articles represent the basic structure of our republic: three branches, divided powers, able to check and balance the power of each other.
However, our Founders understood that any power, checked or not, is corrupting and can ultimately lead to tyranny. With forethought these men included a process by which our Constitution could be amended in order to adapt and properly guide the republic through future evils that they could not foresee.
The amendment process is described in Article V. At a federal level, when approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, amendments can be proposed to the states for ratification (acceptance). If three-fourths of the states approve them, the amendments become a valid part of the Constitution.
In our current state of politics in America it is difficult to imagine two-thirds of both houses of Congress agreeing on lunch plans, let alone important issues facing our nation.
Again, the Founders foresaw that this might happen. Included in Article V is another process by which our Constitution can be amended, a process that precludes any involvement by a deadlocked federal legislature.
That process is the Convention of States. The process calls for two-thirds of the states to call for a convention, during which amendments would be proposed. The proposals coming from such a convention would then need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states. The amendments that pass this process become part of our Constitution with equal weight to any proposed by the other path.
In this way, our Constitution retains power for the people through their local and state legislatures and puts them back in control of the federal government.
An Article V Convention of States is a method by which Americans can adhere to those great ideals in our Declaration, that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.”
The American republic was founded with the notion that it is the people who exercise power over their government. This notion has been distorted over the decades, and now people feel they have no choice but to obey their elected representatives.
It is past time that we the American people exercise our powers against tyranny in our own government. Let us join in a single voice and demand our true independence once again.
