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Ethan McCutchen
Sep. 29, 2025, afternoon

It does lead to a lot of questions, but those questions are generally easier where mini-publics are institutionalized. In the Ostbelgien model, for example, a permanent assembly calls ad hoc ones, so it's clear that the convening itself is democratic. And I think much richer patterns could evolve.

I realized last week I had left out a significant point in this post about Congress's willingness to respect constraints imposed by state applications (and that it may be a long time before I got back this far into the weeds again). So I added this to the version in the archive:

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.

I mean...right?!

Fwiw, I have a couple of posts coming on next steps in this realm. It's taking me a while to get to something actionable, but we're getting there!

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