Last weekend I participated in an unusual event — a conference on the prospects for a federal constitutional convention at Harvard Law School, co-sponsored with the Tea Party Patriots and Fix Congress First. (See the agenda at www.conconcon.org). A wide variety of participants from both the left and the right mixed with surprising comfort and cordiality, and found numerous points of agreement. Something’s just not right with the country, all agreed, and my comment that America has by far the worst political class in its history drew universal applause. It’s certainly true, as even a brief glance at the news will illustrate. When the country was founded, we had Jefferson, Madison, Washington and Franklin, among many other giants. Now we have … well, a bunch of greedy pygmies, I’m tempted to say, except that calling them that would be an unfair insult to diminutive tribesmen.
But, of course, that in itself poses a problem for any new constitutional convention. The Constitution we have now is the product of Madison and those others. Would we get a better one from the likes of Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner? Probably not, and that was the cautionary note sounded by liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe’s concerns about the risks of a new constitutional convention sounded surprisingly similar to the concerns expressed by right-leaning radio host Rush Limbaugh. On the other hand, both the liberal law professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, and the right-leaning law professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown, are more sanguine: Anything new that comes out of a convention, they note, will have to be approved by three-fourths of the states, and it’s unlikely that anything too crazy could pass that test.
