The Convention of States: A Dangerous Shortcut for Constitutional Reform

I understand the appeal of the Convention of States movement. I really do. When you watch Washington spend money it doesn't have, regulate industries it has no constitutional authority to touch, and treat the Tenth Amendment like a suggestion rather than a command, the instinct is to reach for Article V and call a convention to rein it in. I share the frustration. I want limited government, fiscal discipline, and a federal government that operates within its enumerated powers. But here is the uncomfortable truth that the movement's advocates rarely confront: the Convention of States is an attempt to centrally plan a solution to the problem of central planning. And that puts it in direct conflict with the very principles of decentralized knowledge, spontaneous order, and constitutional humility that conservatives claim to champion. This is not a question of motives. The motives are good. It is a question of means. And the means matter.

The Knowledge Problem

Friedrich Hayek's great insight was that no central planner, no matter how brilliant or well-intentioned, can gather the dispersed, local, tacit knowledge that a free people use to coordinate their lives. The price system works because it aggregates information that no single mind could possess. The same principle applies to constitutional reform. A convention of state delegates, hundreds of people sitting in one room for a limited time, is tasked with proposing amendments that will bind 330 million Americans across fifty states and countless local communities. How many of those delegates will truly understand the specific conditions, incentives, and legal quirks of states other than their own? How many will grasp the unintended consequences their shiny new amendment, however well-intentioned, will create in jurisdictions with completely different economies, cultures, and regulatory landscapes? They will not. They cannot. No one can. And that is the point. The Founders understood this. That is why they made the amendment process so deliberately difficult, requiring two-thirds of both houses of Congress or a convention called by two-thirds of the states, then ratification by three-fourths of the states. They wanted change to be slow, deliberate, and rare. They wanted a high bar precisely because they distrusted the ability of any single group of men to improve on the constitutional architecture they had built. Thomas Sowell taught us to look at the incentives and the constraints. A convention creates an incentive for delegates to do something, to prove their worth, to make a mark, to leave a legacy. The constraint of limited time and limited expertise will push them toward grand, sweeping solutions rather than careful, incremental fixes. That is exactly the opposite of what constitutional reform requires.

The Original Convention's Lesson

Proponents of the Convention of States often point to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention as precedent. But that is a dangerous analogy to lean on. The 1787 Convention was authorized to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. Instead, it scrapped the Articles entirely and wrote an entirely new Constitution, a document that required a completely different ratification process. Every delegate knew they were exceeding their mandate. James Madison, who would become the chief architect of the new government, later expressed unease about how far they had gone. George Washington presided over that convention. Benjamin Franklin was there. James Madison took detailed notes. These were not ordinary men. They were the intellectual and political giants of an extraordinary generation. And even they felt uneasy about what they had done. In Federalist No. 49, Madison warned against frequent appeals to the people to settle constitutional questions. He argued that too many conventions would weaken the veneration necessary for a stable republic. He was writing about limited issues, not wholesale revision. A modern convention, called by states wanting to impose specific fiscal limits or term limits, could easily do what the 1787 convention did: decide it knows better and go beyond its instructions. The text of Article V does not say the convention is limited to the subjects in the state applications. Justice Scalia, the great originalist, pointed this out in a 2014 interview. He said he certainly would not want a constitutional convention because who knows what would come out of it. If a textualist like Scalia is uncertain about what the text allows, you should be too. The 1787 exception proves the rule. We got lucky once. That does not mean we should roll the dice again with a nation of 330 million people and a far more complex, polarized political landscape.

The Unseen Consequences

Henry Hazlitt taught us to look at the unseen effects of a policy, not just the visible short-term benefits. In Economics in One Lesson, he showed how the broken window fallacy ignores the losses that are not immediately apparent. The same logic applies to constitutional reform. The Convention of States looks attractive because it promises a single, dramatic victory: a balanced-budget amendment, term limits, and a rollback of federal power. That is the seen benefit. But what are the unseen consequences? A convention is not a controlled laboratory. It is a political process, subject to the same incentives, logrolling, and coalition-building that produce the bad policy we want to undo. Interest groups will lobby delegates. Media will amplify certain proposals. And once the doors open, there is no guarantee that the final product will resemble what the advocates intended. Ask yourself: if a convention were held today, who would show up? Would it be exclusively constitutional scholars and principled limited-government activists? Or would it include progressive activists, labor unions, and establishment figures who would push for a living Constitution amendment, an expanded Commerce Clause, or a guaranteed-income provision? Milton Friedman warned about the law of unintended consequences in government intervention. A convention that opens the door to constitutional revision is the ultimate intervention. You cannot predict what comes out, and you cannot easily undo it. The movement assumes it can control the outcome. That is the same arrogance we rightly criticize in central planners who think they can design a perfect economy from Washington.

The Real Path: Decentralized Resistance

If you truly believe in limited government and the Constitution as written, the path is not a single convention that concentrates immense power in the hands of a few hundred delegates. The path is the already existing decentralized system of federalism, state sovereignty, and political action. Nullify bad federal laws at the state level, as Jefferson and Madison argued in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. The Tenth Amendment is not a dead letter. States can refuse to enforce federal overreach, as they have done with marijuana laws and sanctuary policies. Use that power for constitutional limits. Use the application power state by state to pressure Congress to propose amendments under Article V's other method, the one that keeps the process in the legislative bodies we already understand. Congress can propose amendments with a two-thirds vote. If enough states demand a balanced-budget amendment or term limits, Congress may act. That is how the 27th Amendment was finally ratified, after 202 years of patience. Elect representatives who will actually enforce the Constitution's limits, not just talk about them. This is the slow, grinding work of politics. It requires identifying candidates who understand the difference between enumerated and implied powers and who have the courage to vote against spending bills that exceed them. Build a culture of constitutional literacy so that voters demand accountability. The Founders believed a republic could only survive if its citizens were educated in the principles of liberty. That means teaching the Constitution in schools, discussing it in homes, and holding politicians accountable for violations. This is slow, unglamorous work. It does not produce a single dramatic headline. But it respects the Hayekian insight that liberty is maintained through many small, decentralized checks, not through one big central fix.

The Human Stakes

What does this mean for the ordinary citizen? It means that the next time you hear a polished pitch for the Convention of States, you should ask: who will be in that room? What will they actually produce? And what happens if they produce something I do not like? Because the answer to that last question is: you will have no recourse. A convention that exceeds its mandate is a constitutional crisis. The courts may step in, or they may not. The amendments may be ratified by three-fourths of the states, or they may not. But in the meantime, you have handed over control of the republic's founding document to a temporary body of politicians and activists, the very kind of people who gave us the current mess. The Founders gave us a Constitution built for durability, not convenience. The Convention of States movement offers a shortcut. But as Hayek, Sowell, Hazlitt, and the Founders themselves all remind us, the shortest path to the worst outcome is often the one that looks most tempting in the moment. Liberty is a long game. Let us not gamble it on a convention.