- Americans love going to a convention, an event that sits perfectly at the intersection of feeling like you're part of a community and being a huge nerd.

In fact, the reason America even exists today is largely thanks to a convention.

But what is the constitutional convention?

How did the first one happen in 1787 and could there be another one today?

- Well, as the oldest founding father of the convention, a senior figure is really well needed for a- - It was a rhetorical device to set up a show.

- Oh, I see.

Would you like to see my kite?

- Maybe later.

- Okay.

- I'm Ben Sheehan.

- And I'm Ben Franklin.

- And this is "Civics Made Easy."

- "Civics Made Easy."

- What led to the convention?

To start, what you learned in school may not have been the full story.

So how about a refresher?

In 1776, America declared independence, but we didn't get it.

First we had to fight a war.

And during that war, America wrote its first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, which took effect in 1781.

Two years later, America did get its independence when England signed the Treaty of Paris, officially ending the Revolutionary War.

So now we're on our own with a bunch of debt, because as you know from history and every "Captain America" sequel, war costs money.

So how did states pay these debts?

They raised taxes.

In Massachusetts specifically, taxes got so high that they became higher than what they were under England, and those taxes were bad enough to start a war.

The farmers who had to pay these new taxes weren't able to.

This caused Massachusetts officials to seize the farmers' land and cows.

Many of those farmers were also Revolutionary War veterans who never got paid despite being told they would.

Now they were being told they owed money.

So in 1786, thousands of angry Western Massachusetts farmers grabbed pitchforks and marched on courthouses blocking entrances and preventing the courts from seizing their property.

State and local officials began violently arresting the farmers, making them even madder, so mad they considered overthrowing Massachusetts, but in order to overthrow a state, you need weapons.

So in January 1787, more than 1,000 farmers marched to the state's weapons arsenal.

However, a private militia funded by wealthy Massachusetts businessmen was waiting there to meet them.

The standoff ended with four farmers being killed and 20 wounded.

It's called Shays's Rebellion after one of the farmers who led the march, Daniel Shays.

This uprising terrified rich people in Massachusetts and in other states.

Three months later, those same farmers started winning seats in the Massachusetts State House and rewriting the state's laws to lower their taxes.

As a result, the rich people's fear escalated into full on panic.

So a bunch of them agreed to meet in Philadelphia that summer for the singular purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation, the existing governing document.

But then something happened.

For more, I'm here with William Ewald, law professor and historian in the actual room where the Constitution was drafted.

What was the number one thing that was on the minds of the people who were in this room?

- Well, they had to settle the crisis.

The country had been governed under the Articles of Confederation and things were not working well.

Congress had no power to tax, there was no national executive, there was no national judiciary, and people were worried about the country splitting up possibly into three separate confederacies.

So Madison and others realized they needed to form a strong central government.

And the constitutional convention originally specified as a convention to amend the Articles of Confederation on basically day one, they decided there's no point in amending the Articles of Confederation.

We're gonna write a new document.

- We think today a lot about how the main divisions exist on the left-right spectrum, but political parties didn't exist at the time the Constitution was written.

Can you talk a little bit about the divisions that were present in this room?

- I would say there were kind of three main divisions.

So one was the division between the big states and the small states, in particular on the issue of representation in the Senate.

Division number two was over how much power to give to the central government.

And then there were sectional rivalries over the issue of slavery.

- How often do you think the people who wrote this document would've wanted us to amend the Constitution, and have we done about the amount of amendments they would've liked or have we done too many or too few?

- That's complicated.

So at the very end, they made the Constitution very difficult to amend, not because they expected it to last for a long time.

The primary consideration was we've struck all these compromises and all these bargains among the states, and we don't want the people to get their hands on this document and pull the whole thing apart, so we'll make it extremely hard to amend.

So if you were to ask me what's the worst single feature of this 1787?

- What's the worst single feature of it to amend?

- It's Article V. It's the amendment process.

- Here's the deal.

There are two ways to amend the Constitution.

One is to go through Congress where you need two-thirds of the House and Senate to pass an amendment and then three-fourths of the states to ratify it, which today is 38 states.

That's hard, but it's how we've amended the Constitution all 27 times.

The second way of mending it has never happened.

It's to call a new constitutional convention.

You need two-thirds of state legislatures, which is 34, to call a convention.

At that point, the Constitution says, "Congress shall call it," but that's all it says.

So what happens after is anyone's guess.

So I thought I'd ask an expert, someone who's been closely following the various movements to call an Article V convention.

Virginia Kase Solomon is the CEO of Common Cause, a non-partisan organization that's working to make government more accountable to us.

There have been previous efforts to call an Article V convention for things like abortion rights or even busing.

Why do you think those previous efforts failed?

- I think because there wasn't an overall enthusiasm or desire by people when there's another way to fix things through the constitutional amendment process rather than having an all out constitutional convention.

- So because the Constitution doesn't say anything about how this process would go, what would happen?

Who would set the rules?

How would everything unfold?

- Well, that's the problem.

We don't know.

The framers just decided at some point like, "Ah, we're tired.

We're not gonna get to this."

So nobody really knows, and that's what's scary about it, and that's why a lot of people are just saying, "We can't do this because there are no parameters around it."

So it's just, what is the limit?

- Let's say a convention gets called for a specific purpose, right?

A balanced budget amendment or term limits.

You're saying that a convention wouldn't necessarily have to stick to those things, those original purposes for calling it.

It could just cover whatever it wanted?

- Yeah, pretty much.

That's the scary part is that you can go in with one intent and come out with a completely different result.

The biggest issue with a constitutional convention is that it can just go rogue.

- 28 states have already called in some form for a convention and you need 34.

- Yes.

- So how likely is this to happen at some point and when?

- It is likely that it could happen.

And we've been working really hard to defeat it, most recently in Connecticut.

Also, Montana, for example, just shot it down for exactly that reason because people don't know.

But we are still just a few states away from calling for the convention.

The reality is that our political climate is a lot different than it was back in the 1700s when this last happened.

And there's a lot of influence that comes disproportionately from corporations and political figures that could influence the process where the people's voice actually gets lost in this whole thing.

- What do you think the motives are for having one?

- An amendment process to the Constitution just is a really lengthy process.

It takes a lot of time, there are a lot of hoops and barrels, but that's actually a good thing because it forces us to think really clearly about a singular issue.

And that's another reason why we're opposed because at the end of the day, there is an amendment process that would require a lot of care and thought and engagement from the public.

- To understand the push for a convention, I spoke with Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States, the group lobbying state legislatures and rallying public support to trigger one.

Can you tell our viewers a little bit about Convention of States and what its mission is?

- The mission of our organization, Convention of States, is to get 34 states to pass those resolutions so that we can actually gather in a convention and propose amendments.

- This provision has been on the books for now 236 years.

Why has it not been used before?

Why has it never been enacted?

- Yeah, I think the main reason is, it's really hard, and that was the intention of the framers of the Constitution.

They didn't want it to be easy for us to amend the Constitution.

They didn't want it to be like a mere societal fad or a whim.

They wanted it to take many years and millions of people to all agree that it was time to have this conversation.

And so they made it hard.

I can tell you haven't done it now for 11 years.

It is definitely a high bar.

- One of the reasons on your website that is discussed as a impetus for a potential convention is to balance the budget.

We have a national debt now exceeding $36 trillion.

Our deficit is almost at 2 trillion annually.

Why do you think an Article V convention would be the best method to deal with this issue?

- It's really about human incentives.

When you look at politicians, they have no incentive to balance the budget.

There's a constituent for every dollar sent, and this is a nonpartisan issue.

It's on both sides of the aisle, may be different types of spending, but they get yelled at if they cut spending and nobody praises them if they cut spending.

So the incentive system is designed to keep spending in place.

And so if you create a constitutional mandate that they balance the budget, they'll be able to do so and they don't take the blame for it because it's constitutionally mandated.

- Another thing that's mentioned on your site and that has been discussed is term limits.

Obviously we have term limits for the President.

We don't have them for members of Congress.

Why do you think this is an issue that's best dealt with through a constitutional convention?

And then what do you say to people who think that term limits are not needed, that actually experience is something that can be gained by more terms and years on the job?

- And first of all, over 85% of Americans believe in term limits for Congress.

They have for over 30 years.

The framers never intended for people to spend their entire lives in the central government, in the federal government.

So that's the reason I think it has to be done through a convention of states that people want it.

Congress will never deliver that.

- How happy are you with our current Constitution?

What do you think its biggest flaws are?

- I'm really happy with the current Constitution.

It's not like I'm trying to redo the Constitution.

What we're trying to do is redo the interpretations of the Constitution.

If you order the Constitution from the government publishing office, that's what it looks like.

I mean, so most people have seen a pocket Constitution.

That one's over 3000 pages.

It contains every single case ever issued by the United States Supreme Court telling us what that beautiful little concise document means.

And so the problem we have with the Constitution is not the Constitution itself.

It's really that at this point, it's what I would call a courtstitution.

It's been interpreted by the court for so long and in such a way different than what the framers ever intended that we end up with a lot of stuff that the average person doesn't want or doesn't believe in.

- So we're 15 states away from a potential convention of states.

How long do you think it would take to get there and do you think that America will get there?

- Yeah, I think we will get there because I think Americans are frustrated by what they see in Washington, DC.

Look, I think it could happen in as little as three years, might take as long as six years, but we're absolutely going to get to a convention of states.

- I'm curious to see if an Article V convention actually happens.

Regardless of whether it does or doesn't, what is true is that the founders who wrote the Constitution wanted us to change it, otherwise they wouldn't have given us two ways to do it.

As mentioned in a previous episode, Thomas Jefferson thought we should change the Constitution like a brand new Constitution every 19 years.

But what's interesting about an Article V convention is that it's state legislatures, like your state lawmakers that vote to call one, not Congress, not the President.

If enough legislatures call one, Congress has to set it up.

And state legislatures or many conventions in each state are also who can ratify any amendments proposed to that convention.

In short, state lawmakers could completely redo the federal government's rules and structure.

And the President doesn't have any involvement in this.

In fact, he can't veto any of it.

It's potentially a back door to kind of overhauling America because one of the fears of an Article V convention is that it opens up the entire document to revision.

And because there are no rules about how an Article V convention should go in the Constitution, we really have no idea.

So whether you want an Article V convention or don't, you should definitely know who of your representatives has the power to call one.

To find out who your state legislators are, go to myreps.datamade.us.

Save their contact info in your phone.

Follow them on social media.

Odds are very few of us actually reach out to them.

So if you do, they might listen.

So when it comes to changing the Constitution and our entire system of government, if that's something you do or don't want them to do, you should at least let them know how you feel.

I'm Ben Sheehan, and I hope you learned something.