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Besides the more common method, there is an option to assemble a national convention to propose amendments to the United States Constitution. Article V of the Constitution requires the Congress to "call a convention" to propose one or more constitutional amendments whenever two-thirds of the state legislatures "apply" for such a convention. With 50 states presently in the Union, there must be applications made by lawmakers in at least 34 states in order to trigger this alternative procedure. The convention to propose an amendment (or amendments) has no ratification powers—it may only draft and propose the amendment(s), which then must be ratified either by the state legislatures or by smaller conventions conducted within the individual states.
Purpose
The framers of the Constitution wanted a means of sometimes bypassing a potentially recalcitrant Congress in the amendment-proposing process. They knew that there would be circumstances in which Congress, for self-serving reasons, would ignore valid pleas to amend the Constitution and so the framers established an alternate means of proposing change in the Constitution.
History
All of the twenty-seven amendments thus far incorporated into the Constitution were proposed by Congress—never have the legislatures of enough states applied to Congress to call a national convention to propose an amendment on the same subject. While there have been applications addressed to Congress from the nation's beginning to the 1990s—and from legislators in all but one of the 50 states—Congress has never responded by calling a convention because those applications requested amendments on different subjects. This Congressional inaction has contributed to impression that the applications from two-thirds of the state legislatures must petition for the same amendment(s) although the federal courts have never ruled on this "precedent" which has been quietly established through Congressional unresponsiveness.
In three instances, state lawmakers have come very close to triggering a national convention:
- Only one more state was needed to call a convention for an amendment to mandate direct election of U.S. Senators. But the subsequent adoption of the 17th Amendment which accomplished that goal made the need for a national convention moot.
- During the 1960s, when state legislators were concerned about the United States Supreme Court's reapportionment decisions in the cases of Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders, had there been applications from the legislatures of just two more states, this alternate procedure for proposing a federal constitutional amendment would have been triggered.
- Likewise, during the 1970s and 1980s, only two additional applications were lacking to invoke the process of a national convention to draft and propose a federal constitutional amendment requiring the budget of the United States government to be balanced, except during time of war.
Although resolutions for the purpose of applying to Congress for an Article V national convention have been introduced numerous times in Honolulu, Hawaii's lawmakers have never made such application. In order to constitute an "application," a state legislature's resolution must contain clear and unambiguous language asking that a convention be assembled. A state legislative resolution whose wording does nothing more than to request that Congress itself propose such an amendment for ratification does not rise to the level of an "application" and must not be counted as an "application." However, a state legislative resolution which asks for both of those things does constitute an "application."
Possible scope
Constitutional scholars are deeply divided as to how a national, amendment-proposing convention would function procedurally and whether such a convention would be limited to the one subject for which it was summoned or whether it could stray far afield and expose the Constitution either to capricious, possibly dangerous, revision or even whether the convention would have the power to simply discard the Constitution altogether and replace it with an entirely new document. It is worth noting that such an outcome would be similar to what happened when the convention assembled in 1787 ended up writing the current Constitution. That convention was gathered merely to revise the earlier Articles of Confederation, but chose instead to abandon the articles in favor of a completely new document.
Under the Constitution's necessary and proper clause, Congress could enact a statute to clearly define many of the currently ambiguous and debatable features of this procedure. Up through the 102nd Congress, it was quite routine for Senators and Representatives to offer legislation in both houses of Congress to end much of the disagreement surrounding the convention amendment-proposing alternative. However, in recent terms of Congress, those very same lawmakers, for example Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, have chosen not to reintroduce such legislation.
In any case, by including a clause for the people to hold a national convention, the framers of the U.S. Constitution provided a peaceful alternative to a violent revolt in times of severe public outrage at the U.S. Government in its current form.
Recission of applications
The legislatures of some states have seen fit to rescind their prior applications for an amendment-proposing, national convention, either out of fear of the possible results of such a convention or because the reasons for the summoning such a convention were later rendered moot. Recent examples of recissions are:
"Convention to propose amendments to U.S. Constitution"