Quite clearly Article V indicates the Amendment process to be an authority of Congress, not the states.
Others have said that Congress has a limited administrative-only role in an Article V proposing convention process.
You make it sound as if Congress has supreme authority over the process.
Article V says that Congress' only role is to call the convention when enough states apply, and to select the method of state ratification of proposed amendments. Everything else in between, is for the convention itself to decide.
-PJ
When the convention is called, I assume congress will attach controlling legislation.
When the convention meets, I hope they close the doors, sequester themselves tighter than a conclave of cardinals to elect a new Pope, and do as they wish.
IOW, ‘Eff Congress.
Anything that is dictum is not law, but simply an opinion of the judge who wrote the decision. Coleman did not deliver an Amendments Convention into the hands of Congress, and neither did that 1973 ABA Report, upon which a rather lazy Congressional Research Service based their own evaluation.
The two Supreme Court decisions upon which the ABA and CRS hang their case -- Dillon v. Gloss in 1921, and Coleman v. Miller in 1939 -- gave Congress wide latitude in regulating the amendatory process unless that regulation contravened the clear intent of Article V.
So what does Article V intend?
The Declaration of Independence gave the Whole People, as Madison called them, the right to alter or abolish their form of government. Madison stated that the Constitution and the Union were formed by the Whole People using their separate political societies -- i.e., the states -- as their agents. In terms of contract law, the Whole People were the principles, and the states were the agents through which the Whole People acted.
Extending this line of legal and constitutional thought, the Whole People, via the states, may assemble in convention to alter or abolish their government and its institutions. Article V gives Congress the ministerial duty to set the time and place for such a convention provided that two-thirds of the states apply for one, but Article V gives Congress no other regulatory duty.
Why? Because the Article V Convention represents the sovereignty of the Whole People as exercised through their states. The Framers put this feature in Article V just in case the federal government got too big for its britches.
Why is that piece of dictum in Coleman wrong? Because the Constitution created Congress; Congress did not create the Constitution. During the brief period of its existence, an Amendments Convention is a sovereign body, exempt from regulation by any branch of the federal government.
Why? Because the sovereignty of the Whole People supersedes the sovereignty of Congress.
Why? Because the Union and the Constitution were created by the Whole People via the states, and not by Congress.
Any attempt by Congress to exercise its purported "right" to regulate an Amendments Convention would be contrary to Article V, the Constitution as a whole, and the Declaration of Independence. While the American Bar Association, and the ruling class it represents, would like to control a convention so as not to jeopardize its power, the clear intent of the Declaration, the Constitution and Article V would be violated if Congress attempted to do so.
The bottom line is that an Amendments Convention:
Coleman vs Miller (307 U.S. 433) 1939
Case quotes:
* * * * *
"The Constitution grants Congress exclusive power to control submission of constitutional amendments. ..."
"The Court here treats the amending process of the Constitution in some respects as a subject to judicial construction, in others as subject to the final authority of Congress. There is no disapproval of the conclusion arrived at in Dillon v. Glass, that the Constitution impliedly requires that a properly submitted amendment must die unless ratified with a 'reasonable time.' Nor does the Court now disapprove of its prior assumption of power to make such a pronouncement. And it is not made clear that only Congress has constitutional power to determine if there is any such implication in Article V of the Constitution. On the other hand, the Court's opinion declares that Congress has the exclusive power to decide the 'political questions' of whether a State whose legislature has once acted upon a proposed amendment may subsequently reverse its position, and whether, in the circumstances of such a case as this, an amendment is dead because an 'unreasonable' time has elapsed. Such division between the political and judicial branches of the government is made by Article V which grants power over the amending of the Constitution to Congress alone. Undivided control of that process has been given by the Article exclusively and completely to Congress. The process itself is 'political' in its entirety, from submission until an amendment becomes part of the Constitution, and is not subject to judicial guidance, control or inference at any point.
Since Congress has sole and complete control over the amending process, subject to no judicial review, the views of any court upon this process cannot be binding upon Congress, and insofar as Dillon v. Glass, supra, attempts judicially to impose a limitation upon the right of Congress to determine final adoption of an amendment, its should be disapproved." ...Congress, possessing exclusive power over the amending process, cannot be bound by and is under no duty to accept the pronouncements upon that exclusive power by this Court... Neither State nor federal court can review that power. Therefore, any judicial expression amounting to more than mere acknowledgment of exclusive Congressional power over the political process of amendment is a mere admonition to the Congress in the nature of an advisory opinion, given wholly without constitutional authority."