Article Five of the United States Constitution

They'll never vote for term limits.

That'll have to come through an Article V Convention of the States to create term limits, because they'll never vote to end their career.

But if you get an Article V Convention of the States, you have to have 26 states, I think.

And then you say, we want a new amendment.

The 28th Amendment is term limits, and here it is.

If that convention was held today, what you would get is a convention in which Republican states, Republican legislatures in red states would be able to appoint a supermajority of that body in ways that would prevent or that would effectively allow that Republican supermajority in a proposed constitutional convention to do whatever it wanted.

So the bias that's built into the state-by-state representational function that exists in the Senate also exists in the Article V process in ways that make Article V just as problematic were it ever to be used.

And then these culminate in the...

I think I'll skip this slide.

Number two, make the violent civil unrest so bad that Trump invokes the Insurrection Act.

And number three, "...use that to create a national sense of illegitimacy whereby Democrat governors appear justified in taking the extreme action of refusing to acknowledge federal authority and push to form a new form of federal government via various means, including an Article V transformation of the Constitution." Maybe there's more to it, and it's not as bad as it seems.

But right now, this appears to be a conspiracy to create the next Fort Sumter.

This is a CIA-style color revolution in real time on our own soil.

[laughs] And, uh, you know, collaboration is...

I mean, there's an Article V thing going on now.

I'm sure you've heard of that.

They have, like, over 30 states that have already committed to Article V, you know, to basically have constitutional conventions.

Man, that's my language right there.

So there's a, there's an- there's another venue that, you know, if we start collaborating all together, 'cause part of the problem is when we're all, uh, w- when you have all the people and they're all broken into 100 different things, it's easier for the people in power just to make sure nothing ever happens.

And I believe, you know, I, I, I like to call it, uh, I like to say, if it's not, if, if it's not living, it'll die, but I don't believe in like the living where...

I don't think it says anywhere in the Constitution we should subjectively be able to interpret the Constitution living.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

So for our first session today, I thought it would be most appropriate for us to consider the question of whether the Article 5 Convention process is even the right solution to the problem we all know we have, the problem of federal overreach.

So to kick off that discussion, I get to introduce you to our first speaker on the topic.

He is one of my very favorite human beings, my friend and mentor, Michael Farris.

And there was not a lot of...

And I think there was probably a lot of different views, but they didn't talk that much about Article V, the amendment rule.

And I would say if they really intended it for it to change and intended it for it to change by the will of the people, probably they would not have designed the amendment rule the way they did.

One of the voices that's very clear as they discuss Article V is the voice of people from the slave-owning states, like South Carolina, saying that they don't want it to be too easy to change slavery.

So one of the compromises that goes into Article V is that you're-- they can't even use Article V, uh, to change the slave trade, to get rid of the slave trade for the first twenty years.

And they can't use Article V to change the equal representation of the states in the Senate, which I've already been talking to you about as one of the anti-democratic features of the Constitution and of the way that we appoint Supreme Court justices.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, but it was people from some of the slave-owning states that said they didn't want the equal representation of the states to be changed so easily using Article V.