Amendment Proposal Conventions 

There are two ways to propose a Constitutional amendment: two-thirds of both houses of Congress can make the proposal or two-thirds of the state legislatures can request Congress to convene a special amendment proposal convention. Every amendment proposal since the framing of our Constitution has been made by the Congress. We have never had a national amendment convention. 

One reason that a national convention to amend the constitution has never been tried is that it raises a host of thorny issues. The Constitution does not tell us what a convention would look like. We do not know the number of delegates who should attend, the method by which they should be chosen, the rules for debating and voting, or even how many votes each state delegation should have. 

Perhaps most important, however, is that  it is unclear what limits there can be on the business of the convention. The convention of 1787 was called simply to revise the Articles of Confederation. The delegates in Philadelphia decided to scrap the Articles entirely and begin fresh with a new Constitution. Some have asked whether a modern national amendment convention might do the same thing. 

On several occasions states have petitioned the Congress to call a convention. Early in this century, 31 states requested that Congress call a convention to consider amending the Constitution to allow for the direct election of Senators. Since there were only 46 states at the time, this was two-thirds of the states. Congress, however, declined to call the convention, although it did proposed the amendment itself in 1912. 

In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. Sims that members of both houses in the state legislatures must represent districts of equal population. Prior to this, many states allowed legislative districts that differed dramatically in population. Often, districts were drawn according to county lines, which meant that legislators from rural, sparsely populated districts represented many fewer people than legislators from densely populated urban districts. This meant, of course, that voters in rural counties had more influence in these state legislatures than voters in urban counties. 

The requirement of equal districts in Reynolds v. Sims required many states to completely redraw their legislative district boundaries. By 1967, 33 states had called upon Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution to overturn Reynolds v. Sims. This was, however, short of the 34 states required. 

Beginning in the 1970s, a number of state legislatures began to request that Congress call a convention to propose an amendment that would require Congress to balance the federal budget. By 1995 32 states had made the request. 

In 1988, the Alabama state legislature had rescinded its 1976 vote in favor of a convention to propose a balanced budget amendment. The legislators were motivated by the fear that a convention would become a Pandora+AJI-s box, loosing a whirlwind of political change and fundamentally altering the federal government. 

State Ratification Conventions 

Just as there are two ways to propose an amendment to the Constitution, there are two ways to ratify an amendment to the Constitution. To ratify an amendment, either two-thirds of the state legislatures must ratify the proposed amendment or conventions in two-thirds of the states must ratify the proposed amendment. Congress decides whether a proposed amendment will be ratified by the legislatures or by the special ratifying conventions. Since 1789, Congress has called on the state legislatures to ratify amendments 32 times. Congress has required ratification by special ratifying conventions only once. 

Congress chose to call for state ratifying conventions in 1932 when Congress proposed what would become the Twenty-first Amendment, the repeal of prohibition. In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment had prohibited making, selling, or distributing alcoholic beverages throughout the United States. After over a decade of rampant lawlessness and evasion, most members of Congress and the American public had decided that prohibition was, at best, "a noble experiment."  The Twenty-first Amendment was written to simply cancel out  the Eighteenth Amendment. 

Even though Congress was convinced that most Americans wanted to end prohibition, they were not confident that three-quarters of the state legislatures would support the idea. The reason was that (as noted above, before the decision of Reynolds v. Sims) many of the state legislatures were dominated by legislators from rural areas, which tended to be more supportive of prohibition than urban areas. Congress chose to ask for ratification by special state ratifying conventions in order to circumvent these prohibtion-friendly, rural-dominated state legislatures. Congress required that delegates for the state conventions be selected in such a way that rural and urban areas of the state were represented in proportion to their populations. This tactic was successful, and the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified in 1933.