Some may object that all of this coordination is difficult. In fact, it is difficult, and it should be difficult so as to prevent all but the worthiest reform amendments from being proposed. But consider the matter from another angle: How are 34 State Legislatures ever to be coordinated to the point that they are able to submit 34 identical proposals for any future reform amendments? The only practical way is by a Preliminary Convention where they get together and hash out together exactly what is to be done together. Such Preliminary Conventions are, for practical purposes, going to be necessary for any Constitutional reforms not initiated by Congress. That is just a fact consistent with any project to amend the US Constitution, so everybody may as well get used to it. However, there are two important distinctions: 1) After the first and only National Constitutional Convention, all subsequent Reform Conventions will not be called by Congress and 2) all future Reform Conventions can be and should be convened according to an explicitly limited scope clearly delineated by the State Legislatures calling for a Reform Convention.
And then there is the political aspect. If it is well known that the one and only matter of business of the National Constitutional Convention is to draft and propose an amendment to enable future reform amendments, and this amendment for reform has already been actually drafted ahead of time by the Preliminary Convention, Congress is not under direct attack in the same sense as it would be if the intended role of the National Constitutional Convention included the drafting and proposing of, say, a Term Limits Amendment or a Balanced Budget Amendment. Therefore, as Congress is not under direct attack with something like a Balanced Budget Amendment, it has less reason to obstruct the petition just described above which does not directly threaten Congress at all. Accordingly, Congress should cooperate with the States Legislature and grant their petition request.
Finally, it is important for everyone including Congress to remember that our national government is a federal government, meaning that it is a central government formed by a union of states that in our case created the US Constitution that formed and continues to form our government and has ratified the Constitution and all of its amendments. The amendment proposed here reaffirms the states’ appropriate role in the further refinement of the US Constitution.
The conclusion of this paper is that the US Constitution must first be amended so as to reassert the role of the States in the process of the nation’s governance and especially in the process of reforming that governance in matters were Congress is manifestly incapable and inextricably compromised by its own self-interest. Once that is accomplished it will be at least possible to implement various governmental reforms to the US Constitution, without hoping against hope that Congress would ever do the job on its own, and without the risk of blowing up the Constitution with a National Constitutional Convention.
