A national constitutional convention? An overhaul of American government that would bar the federal government from involvement in many issues, such as civil rights and environment? Might seem far-fetched.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not far-fetched,\u201d Russ Feingold, a former Democratic US senator from Wisconsin, said Tuesday, August 30, 2022, during an \u201cOn the Issues with Mike Gousha\u201d program in the Lubar Center at Eckstein Hall. There are groups working hard to make such a convention come to pass and to gut the federal government as we know it, Feingold said.<\/p>\n
Feingold, now president of the American Constitution Society, and Peter Prindiville, a non-resident fellow at the Stanford Constitutional Law Center and an attorney in Washington, D.C., have co-authored a book, officially released the day of the program, titled,\u00a0The Constitution in Jeopardy:\u00a0 An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re here to say it\u2019s happening and you\u2019d better worry about it,\u201d Feingold said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t January 6. This is legal.\u201d<\/p>\n Prindiville said, \u201cWe should be discussing constitutional change as a first-order question.\u201d<\/p>\n Feingold said, \u201cThis is a coalition of people that are operating with huge funding to do everything, from creating this \u2018independent state legislature\u2019 philosophy that the Supreme Court is going to consider where even if the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Joe Biden won the election, the Legislature could vote and say no. . . . (These are) the people behind January 6, the people behind what\u2019s happened with the Supreme Court. For people to say, \u2018That\u2019s not going to happen,\u2019 they\u2019re not learning the lessons of what is going on in this country. Quite disturbing.\u201d<\/p>\n Feingold and Prindiville focused in both their book and in the Law School program on Article V of the US Constitution, which deals with making changes in the Constitution, either though an amendment process or through a constitutional convention. Since the Constitution was created, there has not been a constitutional convention and since the Bill of Rights was approved, there have been only 17 amendments to the Constitution.<\/p>\n Feingold said there has been \u201can ossification\u201d of the processes of changing the Constitution and the provisions of Article V do need to be updated. But he and Prindiville favor doing this in a careful way. They warned strongly about what many of the people behind the current drive for a constitutional convention might do.<\/p>\n Article V leaves many questions unanswered. That includes what the rules are for counting the number of states seeking such a convention. The number is 34. But determining what states to count is unclear. What happens if different states approve somewhat different resolutions? That\u2019s one of many unclear answers\u2014and there isn\u2019t a clear process for answering the many questions. Prindiville said the rules of a constitutional convention would be \u201cincredibly important.\u201d Feingold said one fear is that there could be \u201ca runaway convention\u201d that could take up almost any subject related to the federal government.<\/p>\n During the program, Feingold quoted from a letter from Marquette Law School Dean Joseph D. Kearney that summed up in one word Kearney\u2019s reaction to the possibility of an Article V convention: \u201cYikes.\u201d (Feingold also thanked the Law School for allowing some of the research for the book to be done using the Eckstein Hall library.)<\/p>\n Gousha, the senior advisor in law and public policy at the Law School, asked Feingold what his reading is of the current state of American democracy. Feingold called it \u201cdeeply depressing.\u201d He said, \u201cIt begins with a grass roots effort to destroy the fabric of respect for our democracy . . . . It is a very deep, very serious, dangerous moment for our Constitution and our democracy. I\u2019m sort of a glass half-full guy but it\u2019s tough on this subject right now.\u201d<\/p>\n