Congress Is Breaking Article V: The Convention Crisis We Keep Ignoring

Here is the uncomfortable truth almost no one in Washington wants to discuss: the greatest threat to Article V of the United States Constitution is not a runaway convention of the states. It is a runaway Congress that has spent generations ignoring the plain text of the Constitution while the rest of us argue about a hypothetical.

Article V says something remarkably clear. It reads: "The Congress… on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments…"

Notice the word. It is not may. It is not should consider. It is shall. In constitutional language, that word is mandatory. It imposes a duty, not a suggestion. The Framers understood this. Alexander Hamilton, writing in Federalist No. 85, called the words of Article V "peremptory." He said Congress "shall call a convention" and that "nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of that body." Hamilton's language could not be more plain. When the states apply in sufficient number, Congress is duty-bound to call the convention.

Why does this matter? Because the state-application route is not a constitutional footnote. It is the emergency brake the Founders built into the system precisely because they knew a federal government would never willingly propose amendments to limit its own power. A Congress that has grown comfortable with unlimited spending, sprawling administrative agencies, and career politicians is not going to propose term limits. It is not going to propose a balanced budget amendment. It is certainly not going to propose returning power to the states and the people. So the Founders gave the states an independent path. That path is Article V, and Congress has spent decades trying to bury it.

The conflict of interest Congress refuses to see

Every one of the 27 amendments to the Constitution was proposed by Congress. Not one has come from a state-called convention under Article V. That is not because the states never asked. They have asked-repeatedly, across generations, for different purposes. The balanced budget amendment movement produced wave after wave of state applications. The modern Convention of States movement has added roughly twenty more. Yet Congress has never called a convention. It has never even established a fair, transparent method for counting the applications. It simply lets them pile up in a committee drawer and pretends the Constitution does not say what it obviously says.

This is more than a procedural oversight. It is a structural conflict of interest. The body being checked by the amendment process is the same body that must call the convention into existence. Imagine a tax collector having the sole authority to decide whether a taxpayer can appeal the assessment. That is the structure we have inherited. Congress has every incentive to ignore Article V, because a convention might propose amendments that limit Congress itself. So Congress does the one thing the text does not permit: nothing.

Let me be blunt. A government that can treat shall as may is no longer bound by the Constitution. Article V is not decoration. It is part of the supreme law of the land. If Congress can nullify the state-application route by simple inaction, then the states have lost one of the Constitution's central safeguards against federal overreach. The document becomes whatever the political class decides it means on any given Tuesday. That is not a constitutional republic. That is rule by the very people the Constitution was written to restrain.

The runaway fear has it backwards

Whenever this argument is made, the objection arrives quickly. What if the convention runs away? The fear is real to many people, and it deserves an honest answer.

An Article V convention is not the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. That convention was called under the old Articles of Confederation, and it did exceed its original instructions. Article V is different. It authorizes a convention only for proposing Amendments. It cannot enact anything on its own. It cannot issue decrees. It cannot amend the Constitution by itself.

Then comes the safeguard almost everyone ignores: any amendment proposed by an Article V convention still must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. That is 38 state legislatures or ratifying conventions. That is an extraordinarily high bar-among the highest in any constitutional system on earth. The Constitution also expressly protects each state's equal suffrage in the Senate. No state, without its consent, can be deprived of that equal representation. In other words, even if a convention produced the most radical proposal imaginable, that proposal would still need to win the approval of the overwhelming majority of the country. The states are not spectators in this process. They are the backstop.

The runaway fear also gets the real danger exactly backwards. The seen danger is a hypothetical convention that might do something reckless. The unseen danger is the current reality: a Congress that has already nullified a mandatory constitutional duty. We are so worried about a convention running away from the Constitution that we ignore a federal government that has been running away from the Constitution for decades. The real runaway is not in some future convention center. It is in Washington, and it has been underway for a very long time.

What enforcing Article V would require

The remedy is not complicated. Congress should obey the text. It should count the state applications honestly, according to their subject matter, and call the convention when the threshold is met. State legislatures should keep passing applications and force the issue into the open. And originalist judges should enforce the word shall.

I have heard the objection that courts will call this a political question and stay out of it. That is not legal humility. That is an evasion dressed up in judicial language. The command is plain. The text is clear. The duty is mandatory. When Congress refuses to perform a clear constitutional duty, that is precisely the kind of injury the courts were designed to address. If the Supreme Court refuses to enforce Article V, then we are no longer arguing about what the Constitution means. We are admitting that the federal government can ignore any part of it that inconveniences its own power.

Originalism is not a buffet. We do not get to enforce the parts of the Constitution we like and ignore the parts that make us uncomfortable. If Article V means what it says, then Congress has a duty. If we are serious about the rule of law-about the Constitution as written, not as reinterpreted by whoever holds power-then that duty must be enforced.

The principle at stake

The question here is not whether you support a balanced budget amendment or term limits or any other specific proposal. That is a separate debate. The question is whether Article V means what it says. If you believe in the Constitution as written, the answer is yes. If you believe Congress is bound by the text, the answer is yes. If you believe in a government of laws and not of men, the answer is yes.

The Founders gave the states an emergency brake on federal power. For generations, Washington has kept that brake locked away. The result is a federal government that grows with every session, spends with abandon, and treats the states as administrative subdivisions rather than co-equal partners in the constitutional order. The people's liberty depends on a government that obeys the text. It is time to remind Congress that Article V is not a suggestion.

The states have the power. They should demand the call. And if Congress refuses, the public should understand exactly what is happening: a constitutional violation committed in plain sight by the very branch that is supposed to be bound by the text. That is the real Article V scandal. It is not the convention we should fear. It is the silence of a Congress that has decided the Constitution only applies when it is convenient.