Free One Way Forward by Lawrence Lessig

Madison’s Bill of Rights.
    But I get that to win this argument, we need to show people why an Article V convention makes sense. We show people by modeling a convention: by building a “convention in a box” and running serious mock conventions to demonstrate that ordinary citizens can think sensibly about constitutional change. At the same time that we mobilize to get legislatures to make the call for a convention, we must get citizens to show one another that a convention could work.
    CallAConvention.org is taking both steps. A cross-partisan organization that advances no single agenda for constitutional reform, CallAConvention.org is intended simply to facilitate a national call for an Article V convention. Its board is politically balanced. The rules of the organization forbid it from pushing for any particular substantive reform. But as well as enabling state-based organizations that would push state legislatures to make a call on Congress for an Article V convention, the organization will also organize the push for mock conventions as a means of demonstrating why We, the Citizens, are able to make the change this government needs.
    You can help this process, too. Go to CallAConvention.org and sign up. Become a supporter of the mock convention process. Become a member of your own state organizing committee. And then, with that state-based organization, begin to occupy your state legislature, to build the campaign to get them to ratify a resolution calling on Congress to call an Article V convention.
    For even if we don’t get the necessary thirty-eight states to make the call for a convention current and binding, the very process of collecting states calling for reform will have its own effect. This is a quintessentially outsider process. It is the one clear way the Framers gave us for making an end run around a corrupted Congress. Any substantial push for an Article V convention will have an effect on what Congress does.
    That is the lesson that history teaches. We’ve never had an Article V convention, but we’ve been very close twice. In the 1980s, the states were close to having enough resolutions to demand a convention for the purpose of passing a balanced budget amendment. That push led Congress to adopt the most important budget reforms in half a century. And exactly a century ago, the states came within one vote of calling for a convention for the purpose of making the Senate elected rather than, as it was at the time, appointed. Congress, in response, quickly proposed an amendment to achieve the same end and, before the final state could pass its resolution calling for a convention, three-fourths of the states had ratified the Seventeenth Amendment, fundamentally changing the nature of the Senate.
    The same effect would happen here. Politicians don’t believe in giants—until they see them, up close and in person. And the giant that is the sovereign of this nation needs to stretch its muscles and show itself to the politicians. The cross-partisan process of pushing the nation to a convention is the chance to show the insiders that the outsiders are here. And we’re not going anywhere. Until we change them.
4. Engaging Citizens
     
    Here’s what conventional wisdom says about this fight: The people don’t care about it. They don’t care about campaign finance reform. It doesn’t move votes. It doesn’t elect candidates. And it certainly won’t drive a constitutional revolution.
    The conventional wisdom is right. It has been about a hundred years since America rallied to such fundamental reform. It will take extraordinary effort by each of us to convince enough of us to do it again.
    Yet this we must do, by drawing more of us into this cause. And we do that by getting more of us to recognize what you certainly see: not that the problem of money in politics is the most important problem facing the nation, but, instead, that the corrupting influence of money is the first problem facing this nation.