There should be a citizen-led path to amend the Constitution

Congress won't reform itself, but a citizen-led amendment path could.

There are many issues with widespread bipartisan agreement that never go anywhere, for example limiting corporate money in campaigns and making gerrymandering illegal. As a surprise to no one, Congress is the bottleneck on these issues and many, many more. If the people on both sides generally agree for years and years, and Congress still doesn’t do anything about it, then that’s a structural governance problem.

For stuck issues like these, we should have a citizen-led path to amend the Constitution as a solution to this governance problem. Now I fully agree that it should be super hard to amend the Constitution, and so we could make this path just as hard as the Congress-led one.¹

The current Congress-led path is two-thirds of both houses need to propose an amendment and then three-fourths of state legislatures need to ratify it.² A citizen-led path could similarly require two-thirds of states to propose an amendment (via something like signature campaigns within those states) and then a nationwide three-fourths vote to ratify it.³ In other words the thresholds could be similar, just put directly in the hands of the people. You would still need most red and blue states working together to pass an amendment, such that nothing could pass without super-majority bipartisan support. That is, a super high bar.

There are a lot of interesting structural reform proposals out there, but most require new Constitutional amendments to have lasting staying power.⁴ To really unlock the possibilities for those, we need a citizen-led amendment path in place first. Of course, we would need an amendment using the old way to get this new way in place.⁵

Congress won’t reform itself, but a citizen-led amendment path could.

1. I’d also argue the current path is too hard, but I’m ignoring that for now since it is independent of this argument.

2. There is technically also a path for state legislatures to call a constitutional convention, but it’s never been used and it still routes through legislatures and representatives rather than citizens directly.

3. Signature campaigns could mimic current processes of how citizen-led ballot initiatives work, but there are other options (including non-signature-based options) as well.

4. A few examples of interesting structural reforms likely requiring an amendment to be long-term effective are increasing the number of representatives, term limits, and rank-choice voting.

5. This type of citizen-led amendment path has been proposed as a Consitutional amendment in the past and hasn’t gone anywhere either, but at some point we may reach a breaking point where something like this could take hold.