Con Con

There has not been a constitutional convention since the original in Philadelphia. A 2016 report from the Congressional Research Service discusses the process of calling a convention, as well as the questions and uncertainties surrounding that process. In the 1990s, the issue came up in the context of a balanced budget amendment.

 Phoebe Petrovic at Pro Publica:

A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power.

While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term.

Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several states, revealing new details about who’s involved and their efforts to advance legal arguments that liberal and conservative legal scholars alike have criticized, calling them “wild,” “completely illegitimate” and “deeply flawed.”

The endeavor predates Trump’s second term but carries new weight as several members of Trump’s inner circle and House Speaker Mike Johnson have previously expressed support for a convention to limit federal government spending and power.

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call a convention to propose and pass amendments if two-thirds of states, or 34, request one. This type of convention has never happened in U.S. history, and a decadeslong effort to advance a so-called balanced budget amendment, which would prohibit the government from running a deficit, has stalled at 28.

Despite that, the lawsuit being circulated claims that Congress must hold a convention now because the states reached the two-thirds threshold in 1979. To get there, these activists count various calls for a convention dating back to the late 1700s. Wisconsin’s petition, for example, was written in 1929 and was an effort to repeal Prohibition. The oldest petition they cite, from New York, predates the Bill of Rights. Some others came on the eve of the Civil War.

Nationwide Injunctions

Many posts have discussed the power of the courts.

Sam Baker at Axios:

Lawsuits against the federal government start in a district court — there are more than 600 district-court judges — then can move to an appeals court, then the Supreme Court.In the old days, district courts' rulings only applied to the parties before them. But since the beginning of the Obama administration, those judges have become increasingly willing to say their rulings apply nationwide — the same scope a Supreme Court decision has.

By the numbers: District courts issued 12 rulings freezing Obama administration policies, according to a Harvard Law Review tally — a record at the time.That leapt to 64 in President Trump's first term. District courts also blocked many of President Biden's signature policy proposals, including student-loan forgiveness.

At least 15 universal (nationwide) injunctions have been issued against Trump's second-term policies.

There's a "completely shameless amount of hypocrisy" right now about universal injunctions, said Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor who has been a consistent skeptic of their rise.Trump, White House officials and MAGA leaders are decrying "out-of-control" district courts — but celebrated their rulings against Biden. Few Democrats who decried those rulings against Obama or Biden are complaining about them now.

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Critics argue the rise of universal injunctions has also fueled a rise in venue shopping.
When you only need to convince one district judge to halt an entire federal program, you'll quickly figure out the best place to file your lawsuit — and keep filing them there.

A handful of conservative judges end up hearing the bulk of challenges to major Democratic initiatives for precisely this reason.

Allowing states to sue the federal government — another trend that gained steam on the right during the Obama years, and is now fully bipartisan — also contributes to the rise in these rulings.

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The one idea that no legal scholar has seriously endorsed is simply defying the courts — as many of Trump's closest allies, including Vice President Vance, have suggested.

Minoritarianism

Steven M. Teles, "Minoritarianism Is Everythwere,: National Affairs, spring 2025

In search of the tyranny of the minority, one would be well advised to skip over the nation's capital and look instead to the crazy quilt of jurisdictions in which America's decisions about land use and infrastructure development are made. A growing field of scholarship has shown that America's unusually high level of local control over these decisions has led to a crippling undersupply of housing, coupled with dramatically higher costs for transportation and energy projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

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A recent report by University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry shows that only a fifth to a quarter of citizens participate in mayoral elections in major cities, that turnout in school-board elections is in the single digits, and that participation in special-district elections is even lower. Those who do turn out tend to be whiter, richer, and older than the electorate as a whole.

Participation is exceptionally high, however, for one group in particular: members of public-sector unions. Ordinary citizens' relatively low election-participation rates provide government's own employees with an enormous comparative advantage, as they have the means, motive, and institutional context to exercise disproportionate power over local governing decisions.

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The structure of American law leads to a peculiar form of lawmaking. Weak party discipline and congressional individualism make it exceptionally difficult for lawmakers to construct coalitions. Legislators under these conditions have strong incentives to avoid blame. Thus the laws they write have become increasingly vague, often delegating significant lawmaking authority to executive agencies. Having been passed the legislative buck, those agencies in turn transfer a great degree of rulemaking responsibility to professional organizations, whose members fill in the details with codes of "best practice" behind closed doors.

Opinion on Inequality

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Karlyn Bowman at AEI:

Inequality isn’t back as a political issue. It never left the stage. It’s not top of mind or a high priority for most Americans because it’s complicated. Americans don’t resent the rich, but most don’t admire them a lot either. They have long felt the wealthy have too much influence on government and the White House. Two-thirds in a recent Economist/YouGov survey believe Musk has a lot of influence on this administration. In another question, 44% wanted him to have no influence, 27% a little, and 17% a lot. In the new NBC News poll, 39% of registered voters had a positive feeling about him and 51% negative.

Americans don’t believe the rich pay their fair share of taxes, and they are content to tax them. While they agree the wealth gap is a problem, they are skeptical about government efforts to address it. In four Bloomberg questions from the past decade that asked if it was better for the government to implement policies to shrink the gap or better for government to stand aside and let the market operate freely even if the gap gets wider, people split evenly.

We’ll hear a lot more about inequality during Sanders’ tour and the debate to extend Trump’s tax cuts. Throughout the campaign, Trump led Harris as better able to handle taxes, and his sweeteners (such as no tax on tips or Social Security benefits) may dilute Democrats’ traditional lead on tax fairness. It is striking, however, how little our complicated views on inequality have changed over the last half century.

Gunning for Humphrey's Executor

Many posts have discussed regulation and the administrative state. 

Dana Mattioli and Dave Michael at WSJ:

President Trump fired the Federal Trade Commission’s two Democratic commissioners on Tuesday, the latest moves in his campaign to exert more control over independent government agencies.

The two commissioners, Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, were informed of their dismissals on Tuesday.

The move runs counter to current Supreme Court precedent that says the FTC’s commissioners can only be removed for cause. The Trump administration has been clear that it is eager to see that precedent revisited.

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In an email viewed by The Wall Street Journal, a White House official said the president wields “unrestricted” power to remove executive-branch officers who were confirmed by the Senate. “Your continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities,” the letter states. “Accordingly, I am removing you from office pursuant to my authority under Article II of the Constitution.” 

Trent Morse, deputy director of presidential personnel, cited a Supreme Court decision from 1926, Myers v. United States, to justify the move. The Myers decision predated the high court’s 1935 ruling in another case, known as Humphrey’s Executor, which was squarely focused on the dismissal of an FTC commissioner during the Roosevelt administration.

The Supreme Court in Humphrey’s Executor narrowed the president’s power to remove FTC commissioners, saying they cannot be removed on policy grounds. Morse’s email to Slaughter and Bedoya argues that FTC commissioners have different authorities—their power is more aligned with the executive branch’s duties—than the justices understood in 1935.

From page 560 of Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

The next conservative Administration should embrace the Constitution and  understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches. This will mean ensuring that the leadership of the Department of Justice and its components understand the separation of powers, that pushback among the branches is a positive feature and not a defect of our system, and that the federal system is strengthened, not weakened, by disagreement among the branches.

One example includes potentially seeking the overruling of Humphrey's Executor v. United States. This case approved so-called independent agencies whose directors are not removable by the President at will. The Supreme Court has chipped away at Humphrey's Executor in cases like Seila Law v. Consumer Financial  Protection Bureau, but the precedent remains. The next conservative Administration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.

On February 12, the Justice Department officially took this position: 

Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 530D, I am writing to advise you that the Department of Justice has determined that certain for-cause removal provisions that apply to members of multi-member regulatory commissions are unconstitutional and that the Department will no longer defend their constitutionality. 

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To the extent that Humphrey's Executor requires otherwise, the Department intends to urge the Supreme Court to overrule that decision, which prevents the President from adequately supervising principal officers in the Executive Branch who execute the laws on the President's behalf, and which has already been severely eroded by recent Supreme Court decisions. 

The FTC firings are not the only example. From the Center for American Progress on March 5:

Today, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., held a hearing in a case that could ultimately decide the fate of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 90-year-old U.S. Supreme Court case that is foundational to the functioning of independent agencies. As the Center for American Progress recently discussed, independent agencies are critically important to protecting Americans’ safety, health, and prosperity. In the case argued today—Wilcox v. Trump—Board Member Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) contends that President Donald Trump fired her without cause, in violation of the law. Wilcox is just one of several independent leaders summarily fired in recent weeks by Trump, who is ignoring well-settled law as he attempts to amass as much executive power as possible

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Independence of the Judiciary

Many posts have discussed the independence of the judiciary.

Adam Liptak at NYT:

Just hours after President Trump called for the impeachment of a judge who sought to pause the removal of more than 200 migrants to El Salvador, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a rare public statement.

“For more than two centuries,” the chief justice said, “it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Mr. Trump had called the judge, James E. Boasberg, a “Radical Left Lunatic” in a social media post and said he should be impeached.

The exchange was reminiscent of one in 2018, when Chief Justice Roberts defended the independence and integrity of the federal judiciary after Mr. Trump called a judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy “an Obama judge.”

College-Educated Parents and Civic Life

Many posts have discussed marriage and family.

Daniel A. Cox at the Survey Center on American Life:

Not all Americans have been as quick to abandon public spaces and communal activities. A recent report from the Survey Center on American Life found that college-educated parents remain very involved in their communities, spending much more time engaged in civic activities than other Americans. The report, Disconnected: The Growing Class Divide in American Civic Life, documents a range of activities that college-educated mothers engage in at higher rates than other Americans.

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Becoming a parent does not instantly make someone a more caring or empathetic person. In fact, some research suggests the opposite. But for engaged caregivers, the experience of raising children fundamentally alters the incentives for being community-minded. Parents are incentivized to get to know their neighbors, take care of local parks and playgrounds, and support local schools—and they have shown a tendency to act on these incentives. They take more of an interest in local affairs and participate more regularly in community events and activities.