Rebuttal to Michael Granger’s Article in response to Haley’s Shaw’s Article calling for an Article V Convention of States Application
New Hampshire has a representative who takes pride in personally killing the Convention of States application, session after session. Read his own argument closely and what you find isn’t a constitutional case — it’s a chain of worst-case speculation dressed up as certainty, aimed at scaring colleagues away from a tool the Constitution itself provides and that the majority of Americans polled consistently support. Our elected officials should be responsive to both the framers’ sound ideas and to their constituents’ desires – especially when they are in alignment.
Let’s take his arguments apart:
The “globalist takeover” framing he writes about has it backward. The claim that a Convention of States would hand the country to globalists and communists ignores who’s actually driving it. Twenty state legislatures — nearly all led by conservatives — have already passed the Convention of States Action application. It calls for exactly three things: fiscal restraints on the federal government, limits on federal power and jurisdiction, and term limits for federal officials. These are the priorities of the very legislators being told they’re secretly inviting a hostile takeover of their own agenda. That’s not a serious argument; it’s a scare tactic substituting for one.
Finally… Simply do the math to realize the chilling risks he outlines are frivolous at best. In the ratification process, it only takes 13 states to quickly kill any extreme proposed amendments arising during his theoretical runaway states convention.
The “Full Re-Write Amendment” comparison doesn’t hold up:
Rep. Granger compares a convention exceeding its scope to a “Full Re-Write Amendment” in the NH House — implying a handful of delegates could simply rewrite the Constitution wholesale, the way a floor amendment can rewrite a bill. But a House floor amendment operates under rules the House itself writes and controls. A convention operates under an application that states themselves define and limit. The Convention of States Action model legislation specifically restricts the call’s subject matter, and state legislatures control who they send as delegates – plus they can pass “faithful delegate” laws requiring those delegates to stick to the stated scope, with recall power if they don’t. The comparison to an open-ended legislative amendment procedure completely misses how the call works.
The 1787 precedent cuts both ways — and the second half matters more:
Yes, some may think the 1787 convention exceeded the mandate it was given to merely revise the Articles of Confederation, and it set its own ratification threshold instead of requiring unanimous consent. That’s real history. But the second half of that history is the part opponents leave out: none of it took legal effect until state legislatures and ratifying conventions chose, state by state, to adopt it. Nothing was self-executing. Today, Article V doesn’t leave that step ambiguous the way the Articles of Confederation did — it requires ratification by three-fourths of the states, through legislatures or conventions Congress specifies, written directly into the same constitutional article that authorizes the convention in the first place. A convention proposes; it does not enact. Thirty-eight state legislatures — the same bodies now being asked to authorize the convention — would still have to say yes to anything that came out of it.
Invoking the Confederacy is a false comparison:
Perhaps the weakest turn in the piece is citing the Confederacy as evidence of what an Article V convention would produce. The Confederate states did NOT call or use an Article V convention — they seceded from the Union and drafted their own constitution entirely outside the federal constitutional framework. Treating secession as a preview of what a constitutionally authorized amendment process would do isn’t historical analysis. It’s a scare image with no legal connection to the process actually being proposed.
Meanwhile, the chronic problems the Convention of States application exists to address hasn’t gone anywhere. A Congress that has shown no appetite for imposing term limits on itself, fiscal restraints on its own spending, or limits on its own jurisdiction is not a Congress ever likely to fix these problems on its own. Possibly 10% of the populace has any faith in Congress for these reasons and more.
New Hampshire didn’t earn “Live Free or Die” by waiting for permission from a body that has never once voted to restrain itself. It earned it by using the tools available to assert that authority ultimately belongs to the states and the people who created the federal government in the first place — not the other way around.
It’s time for New Hampshire to stop letting fear of a worst-case scenario override the constitutional safeguards already built into the process, and pass the Convention of States application.
John A. Luce is aCo-Director, Convention of States Action NH
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