A Constitutional Convention: Does the Left Fear Popular Sovereignty?

Among the most controversial opinions in this past year’s term of the United States Supreme Court was U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton, where five justices, over the bitter dissent of their four colleagues, struck down Arkansas’s attempt to impose term limits on candidates for the House and Senate. Justice Stevens concluded his opinion for the majority by emphasizing that term limits “must come not by legislation adopted either by Congress or by an individual State, but, rather . . . through the Amendment procedures set forth in Article V.”

What one immediately thinks of when reading such a sentence, I suspect, is the “traditional” procedure of two-thirds of each house of Congress agreeing ...