Brilliant men have warned that Delegates to a convention can’t be controlled
• During April 1788, our 1st US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Jay wrote that another
convention would run an “extravagant risque.”
• In Federalist No. 49, James Madison said a convention is neither proper nor effective to
restrain government when it encroaches.
• In his Nov. 2, 1788 letter to Turberville, Madison said he “trembled” at the prospect of a
2nd convention; and if there were an Article V convention: “the most violent partizans”,
and “individuals of insidious views” would strive to be delegates and would have “a
dangerous opportunity of sapping the very foundations of the fabric” of our Country.
• In Federalist No. 85 (last para), Hamilton said he “dreads” the consequences of another
convention because the enemies of the Constitution want to get rid of it.
• Justice Arthur Goldberg said in his 1986 editorial in the Miami Herald that “it cannot
be denied that” the Philadelphia convention of 1787 “broke every restraint intended to
limit its power and agenda,” and “any attempt at limiting the agenda [at an Article V
convention] would almost certainly be unenforceable.”
• Chief Justice Warren Burger said in his June 1988 letter to Phyllis Schlafly: “…there
is no effective way to limit or muzzle the actions of a Constitutional Convention… After a
Convention is convened, it will be too late to stop the Convention if we don’t like its
agenda… A new Convention could plunge our Nation into constitutional confusion and
confrontation at every turn…”
• Justice Scalia said on April 17, 2014 at the 1:06 mark of this video: “I certainly would
not want a Constitutional Convention. I mean whoa. Who knows what would come
out of that?”
• Other eminent legal scholars have said the same – Neither the States nor Congress
can control the Delegates. See THIS.
Yet convention supporters ridicule these warnings as “fear mongering.” And they quote law
professor Scalia in 1979, before his decades of experience as a Supreme Court Justice, to “prove”
otherwise.
Ask yourself, “Is it possible that James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Chief Justice Jay,
Justice Goldberg, Chief Justice Burger and Justice Scalia understood something about the
plenipotentiary powers of Delegates to an Article V convention which the pro-convention lobby
hasn’t grasped?
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