North Carolina legislators voted this month to ask Congress to call for convention of states to suggest changes to the U.S. Constitution. Some Republican legislators have been pushing to file an application for a constitutional convention for more than a decade.
North Carolina’s resolution is added to the pile of requests for a convention that other states have approved and sent to Congress. Congress must call a convention once 34 states ask for one.
North Carolina’s resolution says it wants a convention only to consider a constitutional amendment for congressional term limits. North Carolina’s resolution says its application should be counted with other state applications for term limits toward the goal of 34, but should not be included in the count of state applications on other subjects.
But David A. Super, a constitutional scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, said it doesn’t matter what North Carolina put in its resolution because Congress can count state applications however it wants.
“There’s nothing in the Constitution that allows those limits,” Super said in an interview. “It’s up to Congress how to count.”
U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Budget Committee, wants Congress to call a convention and claims that the 34-state threshold has already been met.
Interest groups are engaged in a coordinated effort to have states adopt resolutions calling for a convention under Article V of the U.S. Constitution to suggest amendments. The convention method of amending the Constitution has never before been used.
Super calls the movement for an Article V convention dangerous because once it convenes, it can propose whatever constitutional amendments it wants. States won’t necessarily be able to choose delegates to a constitutional convention, he wrote in a 2021 American Constitution Society issue brief.
Any proposed amendments coming out of a convention would need to be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures.
States have been asking for a convention since the 1700s, desiring anti-polygamy amendments, prohibition’s repeal, and the direct election of senators. Forty-five years ago, North Carolina was one of dozens of states backing a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Today, the group Convention of States Action is leading one of the efforts for an Article V convention. Started by Mark Meckler, a Tea Party Patriots cofounder and Michael Farris, the founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, Convention of State Action has an aggressive campaign to convince states to pass its resolution calling for a convention to consider amendments “that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”
Representatives have visited the North Carolina state government complex in recent years with a llama dressed in red, white, and blue. The group’s senior advisor, former Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, held a press conference last year with House Speaker Tim Moore and other legislators calling for North Carolina to support its convention application.
Santorum was back in the state this year to speak at a rally for a constitutional convention.
Former U.S, Sen. Rick Santorum (file photo)North Carolina Republicans in the House and Senate have filed bills since 2015 copying Convention of State Action’s proposed resolution. The resolution almost passed in 2017 but was pulled from the House agenda as it was about to take a final vote.
The House passed the Convention of States Action’s preferred resolution and the separate resolution limited to term limits in March 2023.
The Senate approved the term-limits resolution on Dec. 2 as one of its final votes of the session.
The group U.S. Term Limits supports a convention for an amendment on that single issue. It counts North Carolina as one of nine states that has passed the term limits resolution.
Asked whether the single-issue resolutions can be counted with resolutions mentioning other issues to reach the 34-state threshold, Stacey Selleck of U.S. Term Limits said in an email that the question “will likely be answered by the courts.”
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