Taking back America the constitutional way

Summary: The Convention of States Project aims to curb the powers of the long out-of-control federal government by pursuing a state-initiated convention to amend the Constitution. No such convention has ever occurred, although Article V of the Constitution permits the process. Many observers may suspect that this push is a fringe effort with little support. Yet serious scholars have begun to support it, and the group behind it has considerable—and growing—grassroots support. America is a mess. No matter who is in power, the government of the United States keeps getting bigger and less accountable to those it is supposed to serve. Elections, some opine, are largely meaningless. The nation’s unpitying drift to the Left and to increasingly centralized, sclerotic, Western European-style governance with its cradle-to-grave welfare states seems unstoppable. To patriots—that is, to people who support limited government, individual rights, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law, the future seems bleak. It was never supposed to be this way. The Constitution was supposed to protect Americans from what its principal architect, James Madison, termed in Federalist 48 an “ELECTIVE DESPOTISM,” spelling the phrase in all-caps so it screamed out from the page.