Opinion: The Solution Is a Convention of the States

Rob Natelson
January 25, 2021 Updated: January 31, 2021
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This is the fifth essay in a five-part series.
Almost immediately upon taking office, President Joe Biden signed a series of executive orders wiping away the progress of the Trump era and resurrecting some of the worst abuses of the Obama era. In addition, he proposed massive new spending—and more national debt—to be added to the extravagant expenditures of the past few decades.
For more than 80 years, Americans who love their country have been fighting a defensive political battle to preserve the values and traditions that made our country great. But we have suffered one defeat after another. Even the incremental successes of the Reagan and Trump administrations have been wiped away in the “progressive” tide, like sandcastles on the seashore.
This is the lesson we have learned from participating in federal politics. As I wrote in an earlier essay in this series, “In the federal political game, we always have to start on our own two-yard line and run the football uphill. The other side starts on our 20 and runs downhill. The referee (i.e., the mainstream media) calls every real or imaged penalty against our side and rarely calls one on the opposition.”
That’s accurate as far as it goes. But here’s the rest: If we do happen to get possession of the ball, we are allowed one down while the other side gets six.
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That’s why in laying out agenda items in this series, I have limited myself to four that state legislatures can accomplish alone, thereby wiring around Congress. Most state lawmakers remain receptive to traditional, productive Americans in a way that Congress is not.
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This essay outlines the fourth, and most important, agenda item. This is to enshrine corrective reforms in the U.S. Constitution. Experience shows that constitutional amendments have lasting power that other restraints—including laws and provisions in the original Constitution—don’t possess.
The American Founders weren’t superhuman, but they were very wise. They understood that the day might come when the federal government exceeded and abused its powers and the electoral system had failed to remedy the problems. So they inserted an additional remedy in the Constitution: the amendment process.
We usually think of constitutional amendments as responses to changed conditions. But the founding generation recognized that we can use amendments to cure constitutional drafting defects, resolve constitutional disputes, overrule bad Supreme Court decisions, and restrain federal power.
