September 11, 2025

lots to amend

The US Constitution is stuck; mini-publics could unstick it.

How open democracy can bring constitutional reform and vice versa

Any effort to reform American democracy will eventually bump up against the question of amending the Constitution. The Constitution spells out an electoral framework; could it learn to spell a framework of mini-publics? Could the country's most foundational document someday assign powers to assemblies of citizens selected at random? Realistically, could we ever change the Constitution to advance open democracy?

Immediately? Nope. But there is a realistic medium-term path. The path will demand heavy legwork before we’re ready to amend. It will involve a lot of local passion projects to demonstrate the power of mini-publics. It will require stubborn persistence and savvy opportunism in the thickets of city and state legislatures. It will take grit.

And, happily, the path will yield abundant near- and medium-term benefits along the way, generating wise policy, defanging polarization and cultivating practitioners and advocates of open democracy across the country. Then, at long last, yes, we can change the constitution. Here’s how:

The Legislature Route

Amending the constitution is extremely hard. Or, more precisely, proposing an amendment is. There are two formal steps to changing the U.S. Constitution, as outlined in Article V: proposal and ratification. The former is by far the trickier part. To date, of the roughly 12,000 amendments introduced in Congress, only 33 – less than 0.3% – have made it through the grueling proposal process. Perhaps counterintuitively, ratifying an amendment is less daunting; the states ratified all but 6 of those 33 proposed amendments (over 80%).

And amending certainly isn’t getting easier. In fact, if you were born after 1971, not a single constitutional amendment has successfully passed through both phases in your lifetime. The only one ratified in that span – the toothless 27th tweak, which briefly delays congresspersons’ raises – passed the proposal phase along with the Bill of Rights back in 1789.

So we’re in quite an amendment drought. The US has gone 50 years without a newly proposed and ratified amendment only once before; that drought ended amid the Civil War. Why is it so hard? Well, it takes a lot of agreement.

Here’s how legislators can amend the constitution:

1. ⅔ of each house of Congress agreed to propose the amendment
2. The legislatures of ¾ of the states agreed to ratify it.

Imagine a campaign to choose members of the House of Representatives by lot (not a design I'd choose, but that’s for another day). It’s extremely hard to envision a context in which Congress would ever propose such an amendment. A large congressional supermajority would have to agree to forfeit their jobs.

Why would they do that? Spending, on average, a third to half of their time fundraising, most members of Congress treat keeping their job as their primary job. And we want them to give it away? To literally random people?!

From legislators’ perspective, electoral democracy works quite well. It gives them recognition, influence and a direct route to riches. It makes them quite literally the chosen ones. If it’s all but impossible to get any amendment through the congressional morass, how much more implausible is it that a bunch of ambitious careerists agrees en masse to kneecap their ambitious careers?

The two-thirds barrier of the amendment proposal phase is, in effect, a dealbreaker. Simple majority support has proven too high a bar for democratic reforms like ranked choice voting, proportional representation, or electoral college reform. Even incremental amendments cannot realistically hope to succeed so long as even a medium-sized minority of elected officials perceive them as a career threat. And what electees will fail to see a career threat in any proposal that involves supplanting electeees?

The Convention Route

Before we grow too frustrated with our constitution for allowing itself to be so dangerously captured by the elect few, we should acknowledge this: Article V provides another, less legislature-driven way to amend:

1. ⅔ of the state legislatures apply for a national constitutional convention
2. The national convention proposes amendments.
3. Separate conventions in ¾ of the states ratify them.

Let’s call this mechanism – which has never been successfully deployed to amend the constitution – the convention route: a national convention proposes amendments, and then many state conventions ratify them.

(Technically you could mix and match the legislature- and convention-based proposal and ratification methods. An Article V convention could propose an amendment that legislatures ratify or vice versa. For now, for simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with conventions all the way.)

The obvious allure of the convention route for anyone favoring open democracy is the dream of conventions realized as mini-publics. In its fullest form, a national mini-public proposes amendments to our national constitution and state mini-publics ratify them.

Before we start pouring water on the dream, as sadly we soon must, spend a moment in the reverie. A stagnant constitution is brought back to life by a reflective mix of earnest citizens gathering and learning and pondering and deliberating. What would they decide to change? No one could justly claim to know. But if citizen democracy is to have a chance at taking root on the federal stage through constitutional means, this is how.

Getting there

Now to douse. The first and most daunting step in amending the constitution via the convention route is that two-thirds of the states have to apply for a national convention. We’re far from ready to do that.

In the very near term, the idea of a national mini-public constitutional convention ushering in mini-public reforms is quite implausible – and arguably undesirable. Few Americans have heard of mini-publics. Fewer still have experience with them. Are we ready to redesign our national government around practices with which we have so little experience? Of course not.

Phase I. Experimentation

But let’s make a jump. Let’s say experimentation with citizen assemblies starts to flourish in the states as it has elsewhere in the world. Let’s say the open democracy movement manages to string together visible successes. Let’s fast forward to that world, a world in which open democracy is really catching on.

Say many large cities have established permanent councils that send finalized legislation to elected bodies for approval, like Paris does now. Say some medium-sized cities have implemented permanent councils that replace elected bodies. Say some small towns use mini-publics to appoint persons to positions that were previously chosen by elections or elected officials. Say a few well-organized statewide and nationwide assemblies have broadened the audience and made the case for citizen deliberation.

Not everyone in this projected era has participated in mini-publics yet, but lots have, and almost everyone knows someone who has and has good things to say about them. And so when proposals start springing forward to hold mini-public conventions to revise state constitutions, folks are open to the idea.

Phase II. State Conventions

And there is Open Democracy’s door: state constitutional conventions. State conventions distinguish themselves from Article V conventions in at least one very important way: they actually happen.

• To date US states have held over 230 constitution conventions (!)
• Fourteen states have automatic recurring ballot referrals to determine whether a statewide convention should be held.
• Even some states whose constitutions don’t explicitly provide for constitutional conventions have them anyway. Pennsylvania has had five.

State constitutions are varied and messy, as are state conventions, which is part of the opportunity. We’ll save state-specific strategies for another day, but the key point is that we should jump on the chance to demonstrate that citizens can propose and ratify wise constitutional reform.

Phase III. National Conventions

Now let’s fast forward a little further still. Imagine states have held a handful of constitutional conventions as mini-publics, and the results are generally positive. Random folks, it turns out, did some surprisingly sensible things for surprisingly sensible reasons. They didn’t turn the world upside down, but they did defy predictions in often creative ways. Not everyone loved their conclusions, of course, but most respected the participants and the process, and proposed amendments have been ratified at an impressive clip.

At this point, we’re finally ready to start applying for national constitutional conventions. We have experience running mini-public constitutional conventions. We have public awareness. We have public buy-in.

In future posts, we’ll dig further into how to apply for and conduct mini-public constitutional conventions. For now, the key is that there’s a roadmap. We can learn and rehearse and effect open democracy in towns and cities. We can apply our new talents to constitutional conventions in states. And we can then unlock the power to choose our own form of government. Deliberately.