The Founders’ Remedy for a Hijacked Constitution
Article V is not a loophole. It is the deliberate constitutional path to restoration after generations of judicial, congressional, and bureaucratic abuse.
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by Rod D. Martin
May 21, 2026
The moment you say you support an Article V convention, some people hear something very different.
They hear: “new Constitution.”
I don’t want that at all. I want to fix what Congress and the courts have broken over the last 200 years.
We don’t need a new Constitution. We need a restoration. And we need to close the loopholes that the Constitution’s enemies have used against it (and us).
The Constitution the Founders gave us was very nearly perfect, the apogee of human thought on governance. That is why its enemies almost never attack it honestly. They keep the words and change the meaning.
They turn “interstate commerce” into control over the inner workings of the states. They destroy the separation of powers by fusing legislative, executive, and judicial powers in unelected agencies they insulate from accountability, thus insulating themselves from responsibility. They use emergencies to create new permanent powers. They assert that the Constitution itself is a “living document”, by which they mean its words are meaningless, subject to every whim of every judge.
Then they tell us nothing has changed because the parchment still says the same thing. But the structure has been bent badly out of shape.
The problem is not that the Founders failed, or that their work is obsolete. The problem is that, since at least Dred Scott, leftist politicians and judges — in both parties — have treated the Constitution not as binding law, but as an obstacle to be overcome.
For once, the Supreme Court is helping. The Court has begun to hack away at some of the worst excesses of the Deep State and to question doctrines that never should have existed in the first place.
That is good. It is not enough.
Courts created most of the problem. They are not and cannot be the only mechanism for solving it. Even when the Court is right, its correction is necessarily partial, case-by-case, dependent on personnel, and vulnerable to reversal the moment five justices decide to rediscover “evolving standards” or some new theory of judicial invention…or when a Democrat majority expands the number of justices so it can artificially create a majority.
Two hundred fifty years is a long time. Even the best structure can be bent out of shape by generations of error and bad faith. The solution is not to rage against Washington. The solution is to use the Constitution to constrain it.
The Founders gave us that solution. They put it right there in Article V.
They did that through the process of Congress proposing amendments by two-thirds majorities. That’s fine when the system is working. But if it’s broken, if Congress itself is the problem, Article V also gives the states a way to force the issue. Two-thirds of the states may instruct Congress to call a convention; it has no discretion in the matter. Three-fourths — 38 — states must ratify that convention’s work, or it has absolutely no effect.
There are simply too many barnacles on the good ship Constitution. A convention of states can restore the Founders’ vision.
James Madison explained the genius of this arrangement in Federalist 43. The Constitution, he said, had to avoid two opposite dangers. If amendments were too easy, the Constitution would become unstable, changing with every passion of the moment. But if amendments were too hard, defects could never be corrected. Article V was designed to avoid both errors. It made correction possible, but not casual.
Alexander Hamilton made the same point in Federalist 85. Answering those who feared that the Constitution might contain imperfections, he pointed to Article V as the safe constitutional method of repair. And he emphasized the state-driven mechanism: when enough states apply, Congress “shall call a convention.” Not may. Shall.
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The Founders weren’t afraid to amend the Constitution. They did it twelve times within the Founding generation: the Bill of Rights, the Eleventh Amendment, and the Twelfth Amendment. The men who wrote the Constitution did not treat amendment as vandalism. They treated it as part of the constitutional design and as a means to perfect their own work.
They did not fear amendment. They feared instability. That is why Article V makes proposal possible but ratification hard. A convention can propose. It cannot enact. Those who fear a “runaway convention” need not. Nothing proposed by an Article V convention becomes part of the Constitution unless three-fourths of the states ratify it. Today that means 38 states. Just thirteen states can stop anything.
That’s one of the strongest safeguards in American law.
No radical scheme, left or right, can survive that process without overwhelming national consensus. The idea that some cabal could hijack a convention and impose a new Constitution is pure fantasy.
It’s not a convention that’s the danger. The danger is Washington, D.C.
The courts ran away with constitutional interpretation. Congress ran away with spending and delegation. Agencies ran away with lawmaking and adjudication. The federal government ran away from the limits of enumerated powers, from the separation of powers, from federalism, and from the consent of the governed.
Article V is not the runaway. Article V is the brake.
Conservatives don’t have to agree in advance on every amendment, every comma, or every mechanism. The details matter, and they should be debated carefully. But that’s exactly what the process of debate is for, in both the convention that proposes and the ratification efforts thereafter.
Here are a few possible areas for reform:
The Interstate Commerce Clause must be restored to its original meaning. Congress was given power to regulate commerce between the states. It was not given power to regulate commerce inside the states. The FDR-era court went so far as to say that the Department of Agriculture could regulate private gardens because the family might fail to buy produce from out of state since they’d grown their own at home (the infamous Wickard v. Filburn, 1942); or by extension, that a fixed elevator in the Empire State Building is nevertheless within “interstate commerce” because a postal worker might use it to carry a letter from another state.
With “limits” on federal power like that, there truly are no limits. And that idiocy is still the law.
Judges should be expressly bound to the Constitution’s text, structure, and original public meaning. No more “living Constitution.” No more elite preferences dressed up as “interpretation.” No more substantive due process inventions by which five justices impose policies the people never voted for or ratified.
The number of Supreme Court justices should be permanently fixed at nine. Court-packing — expanding the number of justices to create an artificial majority — is currently legal, but it’s not reform. It’s a legal coup d’état. If either party can just add justices whenever it chooses, the Court replaces both the President and Congress and the Constitution has no meaning. FDR proposed this. So did Biden. It’s time to stop.
For much the same reason, new states should not be admitted without a supermajority in both Houses. Democrats have made clear they intend to use the admission process to give themselves four extra U.S. Senators, plus House seats and electoral votes. Simple majorities shouldn’t be able to engage in that kind of election rigging.
Congress should not be allowed to delegate its legislative power to agencies, nor should those agencies be allowed to exercise judicial power. The separation of powers is not a technicality. It is one of the central bulwarks of liberty. The same body must not be permitted to write the rule, prosecute the violation, judge the accused, and collect the penalty. That’s a subject-matter dictatorship, and America has more than a few of them.
Two-thirds of the states should be able to override Federal statutes, regulations, and court rulings.
You may have other ideas. Limits on spending, taxation, and emergency powers come to mind. Constitutional carry, abortion abolition, and sound money should be on the agenda. Several existing amendments should be considered for repeal (especially the 16th and 17th).
These are just examples. Good men can and will disagree.
But they should not disagree over this: Washington will not voluntarily bind itself. The states must force the question.
That is not radicalism. It is federalism.
The truly radical position is that Washington may twist the Constitution forever, expand its power without limit, bankrupt the country, legislate through unelected and unaccountable agencies, expand the Court whenever it resists, and leave the people with no peaceful, constitutional remedy.
The Founders already gave us that remedy.
They did not give us Article V for decoration. They gave it to us because they understood something our ruling class desperately wants us to forget: the Constitution belongs to the people and the states, not to Washington.
Every car needs a tune-up once in a while.
America needs one now.
Very interesting. Agree that it needs to be a difficult process. Revocation of the 16th and 17th amendments needs more explanation. And when you say 2/3 of the states should be empowered to overrule federal laws, regulations and judicial decisions, by what mechanism or collective state branch of government? Would that process differ depending on whether it was a federal statute, administrative regulation or federal court decision (SCOTUS? Circuit Court?) that was being overturned by the states? Do we have enough trust that any process to update the Constitution could not be rigged to favor the Left?
Thus the critical importance of STATE governments’ integrity is elevated into clear view.
I currently suspect many state governments are equally as vulnerable to election fraud and manipulation and are thus as unrepresentative of their state residents’ wishes as is Congress.
These “fabricated” state legislatures are suspect and thus unreliable to fairly represent their voters’ wishes in any constitutional convention or ratification vote thereafter.
Until election integrity has been improved via much of what is in the Save Act that the Senate refuses to address, I fear any constitutional amendment process will be as corrupt as the current federal and many state governments already are.