Yes to changes. No to a convention. Here is why on both.
Reverse Citizens United. The Supreme Court held in 2010 that political spending is protected speech and corporations have First Amendment rights to spend unlimited money on elections. That holding cannot be reversed by legislation. It requires a constitutional amendment establishing that Congress and state legislatures can regulate campaign spending — that money is not speech and corporations are not people for First Amendment purposes. The distortion this ruling created in American politics is structural. You cannot fix who gets heard without fixing how campaigns are funded.
Abolish the Electoral College. Twice in the last 26 years, a president took office after losing the popular vote. The Electoral College was designed for a country of thirteen states with limited communication infrastructure and an electorate that excluded most of its population. The math now gives a voter in Wyoming roughly 3.6 times the electoral weight of a voter in California. That is not a rounding error. It is a structural inequality baked into the selection of the most powerful office on Earth. Replace it with a national popular vote.
Congressional term limits. The same people writing the laws for decades insulates them from the consequences of those laws. Term limits — twelve years for senators, twelve for representatives — create turnover without creating inexperience. The counterargument is that experienced legislators are more effective. The counter-counterargument is that "effective" in a system captured by incumbency means "effective at maintaining the system that keeps them in power."
Ratify the ERA. The Equal Rights Amendment passed Congress in 1972. Thirty-eight states have ratified it — the required three-fourths — but the ratification deadline expired before three of those states acted, and the question of whether the deadline is enforceable remains unresolved in courts. The current President declared it "the law of the land" days before leaving office in January 2025; no Archivist certification followed. This has been in limbo for over fifty years. Resolve it. Sex equality should be in the Constitution, not inferred from it.
Article V of the Constitution provides two paths for amendments. The first — Congress proposes, states ratify — has been used twenty-seven times. The second — two-thirds of state legislatures call a convention — has never been used. Not once in 237 years.
As of 2026, approximately 28 states have active applications calling for a convention to propose a balanced budget amendment. Twenty states have passed Convention of States resolutions covering fiscal restraints, limits on federal power, and term limits. The threshold is 34. We are closer than most people realize.
We are also closer than most people realize to something nobody can predict.
The 1787 convention was called to revise the Articles of Confederation. The delegates scrapped the Articles and wrote an entirely new constitution. That is the precedent. It is the only precedent, because no Article V convention has ever been held.
The legal question of whether a modern convention can be limited to specific topics is genuinely unresolved. Article V's text is silent on it. No court has ruled on it. The scholars who say a convention can be limited make reasonable arguments — the ratification requirement of 38 states is a safeguard, the call itself can specify scope. The scholars who say it cannot be limited also make reasonable arguments — no enforcement mechanism exists to stop a convention that exceeds its mandate in real time, and the original convention exceeded its mandate in the most consequential way possible.
The honest answer is: nobody knows. Questions that would normally be resolved one at a time over decades of case law would all need resolution simultaneously, with no institutional framework to adjudicate them. Who decides if the convention has exceeded its scope? The convention itself? Congress? The courts? The answer is undefined.
I support specific amendments through the congressional path. I do not support a convention, because the risk of an unbounded constitutional rewrite — in the current political environment, with the current levels of institutional trust, with the current composition of state legislatures — is not a risk worth taking. The amendments I want can be proposed by Congress and ratified by the states, one at a time, each debated on its merits. That is slower. It is also safer.
Plank I: Read the Whole Thing Before You Respond. A constitutional convention would ask the country to rewrite its foundational document under time pressure, political pressure, and media pressure. That is the opposite of reading the whole thing. The Constitution deserves the deliberation it was written with — not less.