As you may know, there is increasing chatter about the possibility of Congress calling an Article V “convention for proposing amendments” (sometimes referred to, inaccurately, as a “constitutional convention”).
Recently the New York Times featured a front page article by Michael Wines entitled “Inside the Conservative Push for States to Amend the Constitution.” The focus of the article is on the effort to call a convention to propose a federal balanced budget amendment, which I know something about through my association with with the Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force (BBATF), one of the three groups featured in the piece.
If I might digress for a moment, I note that Wines’s suggestion that the balanced budget amendment effort is “often funded by corporations and deeply conservative supporters like the billionaire Koch brothers and Donors Trust” is, unfortunately, not true, certainly with respect to the BBATF. To the contrary, the BBATF operates with little outside funding of any kind and depends on the work of citizen activists who volunteer their time and often pay their own travel expenses. (No need to mention that last part to my wife, though). But if you happen to be a wealthy donor, feel free to click through to the BBATF website and look for the donate button. . .
Anyway, as Wines notes, “Article 5 of the Constitution . . . allows the states to sidestep Congress and draft their own constitutional amendments whenever two-thirds of their legislatures demand it.” Thus far, “28 states have adopted resolutions calling for a convention on a balanced-budget amendment, including 10 in the past three years, and two, Oklahoma and West Virginia, this spring.” Thus, only six additional states are needed to trigger an Article V balanced budget amendment convention.
Wines is also correct that there are substantive legal issues which will undoubtedly be raised if and when the states reach the magic number of 34. For example, Wines says that “[e]ven if the two-thirds threshold were reached, a convention would probably face a court battle over whether the legislatures’ calls for a convention were sufficiently similar.”
What he refers to is the fact that the 28 existing applications for a balanced budget amendment convention do not use identical language, and it can be argued (and undoubtedly will be argued) that some of them are substantively different from the others in terms of the scope of the convention they seek. If Congress calls a convention based upon these applications, someone is likely to go to court to stop the convention from being held. Thus, Wines is right that there probably will be a “court battle” of some kind.
This doesn’t mean, however, that a court would actually consider such a case on its merits. Before doing so, it will have to answer a novel question: when (if ever) are claims related to the Article V convention justiciable?
Continue reading “The Justiciability of Controversies Related to the Article V Convention”