"No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office."
First question, would the Constitutional convention be a civil office under the authority of the United States? Isn't the reason behind it to keep it separate from the federal government? Second question, don't you think there aren't a ton of Schumer clones and Pelosi clones and Reid and Kerry and Waters clones who would do everything they could to be a convention delegate?
PLEASE, please everyone, cease and desist referring to a “Constitutional Convention”. This is misleading too many people into false thoughts - it’s so lazy, inaccurate and dangerously deceitful that I have concluded that its usage here is probably a statist tactic to divert and derail the debate.
Please call it a “Convention of the States” or a “Convention for Proposing Amendments to the Constitution”. Anything but what it is not.
And what is it not? It is NOT NOT NOT a Constitutional Convention, nothing like it at all.
To be precise in language, "federal government" means Article I legislative offices, Article II executive offices, and Article III judiciary offices, along with Article I-authorized lower courts. Article V conventions derive their authority from the same place as Article I, II, and III office-holders, the United States Constitution.
"Under authority of the United States" also includes the states themselves, since it is the people and the states that ordained and established the Constitution in the first place. I can't imagine a definition of "authority of the United States" that excludes the states themselves from authority. The Constitution has limits on what the federal government can do, and it has limits on what the states can do, but Amendments 9 and 10 made it clear that the states held supreme authority for anything not specifically delegated by them to the federal government.
To the second question, you are correct that there are many clones. So be it. The point is that the currently seated Article I office-holders cannot participate in an Article V convention without first resigning from their Article I offices.
-PJ