[Cen-Tejas]

Great post!

Question though? Isn’t the article we are both writing about concerning itself with a “Constitutional Convention” which is a wholly different animal from an “Article V Convention”?

[Publius]

From a purely technical standpoint, any convention aimed at writing or modifying a constitution could be described as a "constitutional convention." But there is a reason we try to avoid that term.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 took 80% of the Articles of Confederation, renumbered the articles via the Committee of Design, and then integrated that text with new material written by Madison concerning the Executive and Judiciary branches. The Articles were a mess, as anybody who has read them can see. The final product, a new constitution, was a terse document of about 4000 words that showed a genuine economy of prose.

Technically, you can use the formula:

Constitutional Convention = Article V Convention = Convention of the States = Convention for Proposing Amendments

The reason we avoid using the term "Constitutional Convention" is because Article V only allows "a convention for proposing amendments to this constitution." If you go back to my "boilerplate" post earlier in this thread, you can see how I parse Article V into its component parts in standard English.

The people who bandy about the term "Constitutional Convention" fall into two camps. The first is journalists who either use the term from ignorance or who intend to frighten people into thinking that a Convention of the States could toss out the Constitution and substitute something new. The second is those who oppose such a convention -- they may be liberal or conservative -- because they believe that the American people are no longer capable of self-government and may advertently or inadvertently modify or eliminate parts of the Constitution that they like.

For that reason, I've always avoided "Constitutional Convention." I used the term "Article V Convention" until one day someone said, "Dude, like what's an Article V?" I preferred "Convention for Proposing Amendments" until the current backers came up with the term "Convention of the States." I like that and abbreviate it "COS." If you go back to my "boilerplate" post, you'll see that Article V doesn't permit tossing out the Constitution and starting over, which means that a Constitutional Convention like the one we had in 1787 is outside the scope of Article V.

I recommend the "Convention of the States" usage because it's clear and succinct.