Monday, December 12, 2011
The Constitution of the United States (click here) is studied throughout the world
as a model blueprint for governing a free people, its framers revered
for achieving what Catherine Drinker Bowen famously labeled the "Miracle
at Philadelphia."
But concern over a seemingly dysfunctional climate in Washington and issues ranging from the national debt to the overwhelming influence of money in politics have spawned calls for fundamental change in the document that guides the nation's government. From the left and the right, a small but seemingly growing cadre of scholars and activists is calling for a new constitutional convention to respond to the changes and excesses of current politics.
Such a convention is envisioned in the text of the founding 1787 document but has never been employed. The amendments that, among other things, ended slavery, enfranchised women and established, then ended, Prohibition were adopted through two-thirds votes in Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states. Article V of the Constitution, however, in the same section that set up that procedure, set forth the legal possibility for the legislatures of two-thirds of the states to instruct Congress to call a constitutional convention, a mechanism, in the view of some government critics, whose time has come....
But concern over a seemingly dysfunctional climate in Washington and issues ranging from the national debt to the overwhelming influence of money in politics have spawned calls for fundamental change in the document that guides the nation's government. From the left and the right, a small but seemingly growing cadre of scholars and activists is calling for a new constitutional convention to respond to the changes and excesses of current politics.
Such a convention is envisioned in the text of the founding 1787 document but has never been employed. The amendments that, among other things, ended slavery, enfranchised women and established, then ended, Prohibition were adopted through two-thirds votes in Congress and ratified by three-quarters of the states. Article V of the Constitution, however, in the same section that set up that procedure, set forth the legal possibility for the legislatures of two-thirds of the states to instruct Congress to call a constitutional convention, a mechanism, in the view of some government critics, whose time has come....
