September 18, 2025

lots to apply

how to call a national mini-public constitutional convention

To enjoy this post, you’ll need two things: (1) a mood for wonkery and (2) a little context:

This newsletter advocates for the widespread adoption of mini-publics, deliberative bodies composed of randomly-selected citizens. It’s articulating a long-term roadmap for this adoption, starting with cities and counties, moving to states and state constitutional conventions, and eventually moving all the way to national Article V conventions, a not-yet-used mechanism for amending the US Constitution.

The framers offered two routes to amend the Constitution: congressional supermajorities and conventions. All 27 amendments to date have used the former option, the legislature route. Framers at the original Constitutional Convention believed that there should be an alternative to that route and, without evident controversy, agreed upon a convention route explicitly as a check against legislators’ power.

But no such convention can bypass legislators entirely. Article V involves legislators in national constitutional conventions in two main ways:

1. State legislators from ⅔ of the states have to apply for a convention.
2. Congress has to call it.

Today, we’re going to sail past the hardest question: why would state legislators apply for a convention? (And we’re not even mentioning the states’ role in ratifying whatever conventioneers might propose). The answers will hinge on state dynamics, personalities, and narratives; each state will require its own strategy. In all cases, though, it will involve spreading open democracy practices across towns, cities, and counties so that they become familiar and trusted.

For now, imagine we've done that work, mini-publics have really caught on, and two-thirds of the state legislatures are ready to submit an application for a national convention. (It wouldn’t happen all at once like this, but bear with me.) The question today is how should states compose their applications to have the greatest chance of success?

Success here means not just holding a national constitutional convention but doing so in accordance with open democratic principles. Among them:

• Conventioneers must be selected by lot.
• All citizens must have equal participation rights within the lottery.
• Facilitation must ensure rich deliberation and give conventioneers equal voice

How can we make that happen? How, in other words, can we ensure that Congress calls an Article V convention as a mini-public?

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First off, can we even ensure that Congress calls a convention at all? Say ⅔ of the states have formally applied for a national constitutional convention. Will Congress really call it?

On the surface, the Constitution doesn’t seem to offer much of a loophole here. “The Congress…, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.” As Alexander Hamilton noted in The Federalist, Number 85:

The words of this article are peremptory. The Congress "shall call a convention.'' Nothing in this particular is left to the discretion of that body. And of consequence, all the declamation about the disinclination to a change vanishes in air.

Here’s the thing, though: ⅔ of the states have already formally applied for a national constitutional convention, and Congress hasn’t called one yet. States have in fact submitted many hundreds of convention applications in the two and a half centuries since the Constitution was ratified. Why no convention? There are two main reasons:

• Many (in fact most) applications list specific issues for the convention to focus on: balanced budgets, apportionment, etc. No specific issue has, on its own, crossed the ⅔ threshold.
• Some state legislatures have had a change of heart and voted to rescind their applications.

The most aggressive proponents of Article V conventions reject both excuses, because the Constitution doesn’t specifically mention such things. Article V doesn’t say you can rescind an application. Nor does it say that an application can restrict a convention by issue, so they argue that Congress should lump all the applications together, regardless of issue, and call a convention once ⅔ of the states have applied. By these aggressive standards, advocates reckon Congress should have called multiple conventions already.

Without weighing the legal merits of their case; it seems like a different approach will be more successful in gaining the popular support needed to force Congress’s hand. If 34 (⅔ of 50) states submit (and don’t rescind) applications that are uniformly applying for the same convention, Congress will see its wiggle room, in Hamilton’s words, “vanish in air”.

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And what exactly should these uniform state applications for constitutional conventions contain? There are two main questions to ponder:

1. Should they specify a mini-public format?
2. Should they be issue-specific or general?

I’ll not be too coy about my take: they should specify a mini-public format for a general (non-issue-specific) convention.

We don’t know for certain whether Congress would agree to structure a convention as a mini-public if states’ applications demanded it. But we do have some pretty good clues as to how they would structure the convention if left to their own devices.

While there’s never been an Article V convention, there have been enough attempted conventions over the years to catch Congress’ eye. One campaign launched in the sixties advocated for a convention around districting. Another soon gained traction around the idea of a balanced budget convention. After both got some-but-not-enough states to submit formal convention applications, Congress started drafting rules for how conventions would run. Starting in the early seventies a couple dozen convention planning bills were introduced in each congressional house, and two of them – both named The Federal Constitutional Convention Procedures Act – actually passed in the Senate.

The convention procedures prescribed in those nearly successful bills varied in detail, but the broad strokes were similar, and, unsurprisingly, all of them look a lot like the legislative procedures to which the conventions are supposed to provide an alternative. Convention slots were typically to be apportioned to states based on either the number of representatives in the House or the combined number of congresspeople in the House and Senate (a la the electoral college). Attendees would be, surprise surprise, elected. Usually the Vice President (as in, of the US) would preside over the start of the convention and oversee the election of officers. And then the inevitable process rules involving voting, voting, and more voting. In short, Congress designed conventions to work as Congress works: elected people (representatives) electing people (leaders) to manage decisions by elections.

These not-quite-passed bills also empowered Congress to block amendments proposed by constitutional conventions. The bills suggest exactly two grounds for refusing to send such amendments on to the states:

1. The convention fails to follow the procedures specified by Congress.
2. The convention has been called to address a specific issue, but the amendment goes beyond its scope.

These bills never became law, but they give us a picture of where Congress believes (or at least believed) it could and couldn’t intervene in an Article V convention. According to the bills, Congress can determine convention procedures and enforce adherence to them. And it can enforce limits to conventions’ scope specified by the states’ applications.

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With these assertions about Congress’s presumed role in conventions in mind, let’s return to our two questions about the national convention applications from the states:

1. Should convention applications specify a mini-public format?

The first one is pretty easy; if the applications don’t specify a format, then Congress is likely to pick the format and to fall back on what it knows: vote, vote, vote. Convention delegates will be elected, so the candidates will be partisan, the convention won’t be remotely representative, and the deliberation will be thoroughly contaminated.

Even if the applications do uniformly specify the same mini-public format, it’s not entirely clear that Congress would be required to respect it, but the political pressure to do so would be immense. And if Congress were to argue that states could not constrain conventions, they'd create quite a legal pickle for themselves. As we saw, their argument for not having called any conventions yet is that they were respecting the constraints the state applications imposed.

2. Should convention applications be issue-specific or general?

The second question is more involved, but there are several arguments in favor of general conventions.

First off, the constitutionality of general conventions is surprisingly uncontroversial. While there is not broad agreement that general conventions would be wise, there is broad agreement that the framers fully intended to allow them. The constitutionality of issue-specific conventions, by contrast, is much hairier. Scholars have spent a lot of time debating the capacity of applications to restrain conventions and the possibility of a “runaway convention”, where attendees propose amendments not relevant to the topics specified in applications. General conventions pose no such problem.

Second, proposals produced at general conventions will be harder for Congress to block. Congress has argued it can choose not to send for ratification any proposal they believe is out of scope. But this is not a problem for general conventions; proposals can’t be out of scope if no scope is set. As we saw in the almost-passed convention procedures bills above, many in Congress concluded that they had the authority to deem amendments proposed at issue-specific conventions “out of scope” and opt not to send them to the states for ratification – no such option, even conceptually, applies to a general convention.

A third rationale builds on the argument that in order to be a genuine republic, the populace must at regular intervals choose its form of government (See our lots to constitute post). Only a general convention could do this, and one could even imagine such a convention consecrating the idea of a periodic general convention into the Constitution. (Frankly, that would be considerably less messy and more internally consistent than the current application process),

But the best argument for a general convention is the simplest one: there is no one better suited than the mini-public itself to determine the right scope of change.

I see only one formidable argument against a general convention: that it may be a tough sell to the public. Even in a world where mini-publics have earned a considerable degree of trust, opponents would work to stoke fear that general convention attendees would run wild and make extreme and irresponsible changes.

Of course, convention attendees won’t be empowered to rewrite the Constitution alone; any proposed amendments would have to be approved by ¾ of the states to take effect. But more importantly, there is little reason to believe a body genuinely representative of the US public would come to agreement on radical unproven alterations out of step with the public. Elected bodies occasionally do such things; randomly selected bodies do not. A mini-public is a much more faithful representation of the public than any elected assembly. The public reveres much of the US Constitution; therefore so would a mini-public. The public has strong elements of caution about constitutional change; therefore a mini-public would, too.

The public, we forget, can be wise. We know it can also be nutso, because we live in a political system that cultivates nutso. Mini-publics don't. They cultivate learning and deliberation. They cultivate integration. They cultivate public wisdom. We should learn to trust them.

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If we are to realize a mini-public constitutional convention, then, the challenge before us is to produce 34 uniform state applications for a general national constitutional convention, clearly specifying a practical, open democratic format. Are we ready, everyone?

Yeah, no. First we need some successful state conventions under our belt. We need them for buy-in on the idea of a general national mini-public convention. We need them for practice. And we need them for the wise changes they'll make to state constitutions along the way.

Just as importantly, we have to figure out what exactly we're putting on those state applications. What format exactly do they specify? How many participants, how much time, how are subgroups formed, how are they facilitated, etc. These questions alone warrant a national mini-public, albeit one of a much smaller scale. (A national constitutional convention might involve hundreds of participants in deliberations distributed over the course of multiple months. A convention planning mini-public might take a dozen participants a matter of days.)

But before we dig further into any of that we need something else: a wonkery break. If you made it this far in the deep dive, you've earned it. Now we're going to step away from constitutional change for a little bit. We'll return before long to pick up some of the questions we've left hanging surrounding state conventions, convention formats, etc. But we're going to focus next on democracy at a more human scale, which, after all, is mini-publics' greatest magic.

References

• The 27 Amendments
• Constitutional Convention debates
• Article V
• Article V Library - includes state applications to date
• A write-up of Article V issues of interest to Congress by the Congressional Research Service
• Failed convention planning bills