The Hill: Conservatives prepare new push for constitutional convention

SAN DIEGO — Conservative lawmakers will mount a new push to call a constitutional convention aimed at creating a balanced budget amendment and establishing term limits for members of Congress in an effort to rein in what they see as a runaway federal government.

State legislators meeting at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s policy conference here last week hope to use Article V of the Constitution, which allows state legislatures to call a convention to propose new amendments. …

It is not even clear that state calls for a constitutional convention must be limited to narrow or specific topics. While the ALEC draft legislation mentions a balanced budget amendment and term limits, others have issued calls for a convention meant to tackle limits on Congress’s ability to levy taxes, or gun control, or rolling back the right to an abortion.

Along with the 15 Republican-led states that have approved ALEC’s model legislation, another five Democratic-led states — Vermont, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Rhode Island — have approved calls for a convention focused on campaign finance reform. The group behind that proposal, called Wolf-PAC, was founded a decade ago by the progressive commentator Cenk Uygur.

“What we’re seeing is they’re kind of putting all these applications into one basket,” said Rebecca Timmons, a communications coordinator at Common Cause, which opposes the Article V convention. “There are no guardrails.”