Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five — The Convention
The application from the legislature of the State of Wisconsin reached the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives at 11:14 in the morning on the third of February, 2028.
The application was the thirty-fourth application.
The Clerk of the House, who had been in his office for nineteen years and who had, over the course of those nineteen years, processed perhaps a hundred and fifty Article V applications from various state legislatures on various subjects, none of which had reached the threshold of two-thirds, looked at the document the staff had brought him and looked at the chart on the wall of his office, on which he had been keeping count, in his own hand, since the autumn of 2026, when the count had first begun to seem worth keeping.
The chart had thirty-three marks.
The Clerk took a pen from the cup on his desk. He drew the thirty-fourth mark.
He counted the marks.
He counted them again.
He sat for some time at his desk.
He picked up the phone. He called the Speaker of the House. The Speaker was, that morning, in a hearing on the second floor. The Speaker’s chief of staff answered the phone. The Clerk said: I need to speak with the Speaker. It is not a matter that can wait an hour.
The chief of staff said: what is it.
The Clerk said: we have the thirty-fourth application.
There was a silence on the line.
The chief of staff said: for what.
The Clerk said: for the convention. The Article V convention. On the US Majority Amendment.
There was another silence.
The chief of staff said: the Speaker will call you back in fifteen minutes.
The Speaker called the Clerk back in eleven minutes. The Speaker said: are you certain.
The Clerk said: I have read the document. I have compared the language to the language of the previous thirty-three. The language is identical in the operative section. The application has been certified by the Secretary of State of Wisconsin. The application is valid on its face.
The Speaker said: and the count is now thirty-four.
The Clerk said: yes, Madam Speaker.
The Speaker said: thirty-four out of fifty.
The Clerk said: yes.
The Speaker said: which is more than two-thirds.
The Clerk said: yes, Madam Speaker. Two-thirds is thirty-four. Wisconsin is the thirty-fourth.
The Speaker said: Mr. Clerk, what is the procedure from here.
The Clerk said: Madam Speaker, the procedure is that the Congress, on receipt of valid applications from two-thirds of the state legislatures on a single subject, shall call a convention for the proposing of amendments. The Constitution does not specify the time within which the call must be made. The Constitution does not specify the form of the convention. The Constitution does not specify the rules under which the convention shall operate. The Constitution specifies only that the call shall be made.
The Speaker said: and the call has not been made.
The Clerk said: the call has not been made. The Congress has, in the course of the two centuries during which the threshold has not previously been reached, never been required to make the call. There is no precedent.
The Speaker said: there is the Twenty-First Amendment.
The Clerk said: Madam Speaker, the Twenty-First Amendment was proposed by the Congress and ratified by state conventions. The instrument we are now confronting is the other instrument — the convention proposed by the states and called by the Congress. That instrument has not, in the country’s history, been used.
The Speaker said, after a moment: Mr. Clerk, I would like you to do nothing for the next twelve hours.
The Clerk said: Madam Speaker, the application has been received. The application is in the public record. The Secretary of State of Wisconsin has, by my information, already announced the filing.
The Speaker said: announced where.
The Clerk said: on a podcast.
The Speaker did not, at first, respond.
The Clerk said: Madam Speaker, the announcement is, as we are speaking, being shared on every major platform.
The Speaker said: Mr. Clerk, I am going to call the President.
She called the President.
The President said: I know.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, you know.
The President said: I have known, Madam Speaker, for some hours. I was informed by a source the nature of which I will, at some point in the next several months, explain to you.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, the Constitution requires us to call the convention.
The President said: yes, Madam Speaker.
The Speaker said: we have, in this Congress, the votes to delay.
The President said: we do.
The Speaker said: we have the votes to attach conditions. To specify a single-subject rule. To specify the rules of the convention in such a way that the convention, when it sits, cannot do what the applications have requested it to do.
The President said: we do, Madam Speaker. The Congress does. The Congress has done such things in lesser matters. The Congress is not without instruments to slow this.
The Speaker said: and you, Mr. President.
The President said: I will, Madam Speaker, sign whatever bill the Congress sends me with respect to the calling of the convention.
The Speaker said: which bill.
The President said: Madam Speaker, I will sign a clean call. I will not, on my signature, attach the conditions. I will, if the Congress sends me a bill that attaches conditions, veto it.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, your party will not stand for that.
The President said: Madam Speaker, I have considered that. I have decided. I am, on this matter, prepared to be the President who lost the support of his party in order to allow the country to do what the country, through its legislatures, has asked to do.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, may I ask why.
The President said: Madam Speaker, you may. I am not, this morning, prepared to fully answer. I will say only that I have been persuaded, over a period of months, that the country has earned the convention, and that the office I hold does not give me the right to obstruct it. I will say that the persuasion was not, at first, my own. I will say that I have, after long consideration, made the persuasion mine.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, the country has not, in your service, seen this from you.
The President said: the country has not, Madam Speaker, asked it of me before.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, I will be candid.
The President said: please.
The Speaker said: if you sign a clean call, the convention will sit, and the convention will, on the evidence available to me from the composition of the state legislatures that have applied, ratify the amendment in substantially the form the applications have specified. Your party, Mr. President, has spent forty years building the system the amendment will dismantle. Your donors will not forgive you. The networks that placed you in this office will not forgive you. The men whose checks built the apparatus that put your name on the ballot will, in the cycle to come, build the apparatus to remove you.
The President said: Madam Speaker, I have been told that already. I have been told it by my Chief of Staff, by my counsel, by my wife, and by men whose names you would recognize if I named them. I have, in the consideration of these warnings, asked myself what the office is for, if the holder of it cannot, in the moment when the office is asked to do a thing the country has earned, do that thing. I have not been able to answer the question in any way that allows me to refuse the call.
The Speaker said: Mr. President.
The President said: Madam Speaker.
The Speaker said: I am, on this matter, with you.
The President said: thank you, Madam Speaker.
The Speaker said: Mr. President, I would like to be clear that my standing with you is not an endorsement of the amendment. I have not, on the merits, formed a final view of the amendment. My standing with you is on the procedural matter, which is whether the Congress, having received the applications, has the authority to refuse the call. I have read the relevant sections. I do not believe the Congress has that authority.
The President said: that is sufficient, Madam Speaker.
The Speaker said: I will move the call.
The President said: thank you.
The Speaker said: Mr. President.
The President said: yes.
The Speaker said: I would like, at some future point, the answer to the question I asked.
The President said: Madam Speaker, you will have it. I cannot, this morning, give it. I will give it.
The Speaker said: that is sufficient.
The conversation ended.
The convention was called for the seventeenth of June, 2028.
The convention was to be held in the city of Philadelphia, in the building in which the original Constitutional Convention had been held, on the grounds that the symbolism of the choice was the kind of symbolism that the country, in the present hour, required and that the building, on examination by the Architect of the Capitol, was structurally adequate to the proceedings expected of it. The state of Pennsylvania had agreed to host. The General Services Administration had agreed to fund the security and the logistics. The Smithsonian had agreed to provide the historical staff. The arrangements had been made, in the four months between the call and the date, with the kind of speed that the federal apparatus was capable of when the apparatus had decided that the matter was the matter it had been asked to do.
The delegates were chosen by the method the applications had specified, which was that each state should hold a special election, on a date the state determined within a forty-day window, in which the voters of the state should elect delegates pledged to the calling of the convention and to the consideration of the US Majority Amendment as the convention’s exclusive subject. The pledge was binding under the laws of the states that had passed conforming legislation, which, by the spring of 2028, was forty-one of the fifty states. The remaining nine states had appointed delegates by the action of their legislatures, in the older mode of the Twenty-First Amendment ratifications, with similar pledges enforceable under state law.
The delegates, on examination, were a body the country had not seen before.
There were five hundred and fifty-six of them. They were apportioned by population, in the manner of the House of Representatives, with adjustments the convention’s organizing committee had specified for the inclusion of small-state representation in a manner the committee had judged consistent with the spirit of the original convention. There were teachers among them. There were nurses. There were three former generals. There were eleven sitting state legislators who had run for the convention seat as part of their broader campaigns. There were small-business owners. There were ministers. There were six members of Native American tribes elected by their states’ general electorates. There were forty-three veterans of the wars of the previous quarter century. There were ninety-two delegates under the age of thirty-five. There were a hundred and fourteen delegates over the age of seventy.
There were, by the count of the organizing committee, four sitting members of Congress, all of whom had been elected to the convention seat in their state and had announced that they would, on the calling of the convention, recuse themselves from the relevant House and Senate proceedings for the duration.
There were no sitting governors.
There was, on examination, no person of the donor class.
The delegates assembled in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of June.
The convention sat for forty-three days.
Sarah Beth Kowalski was a delegate from the State of South Carolina.
She had been elected, in the special election held in March of 2028, with sixty-three percent of the vote in her congressional district, which was the highest percentage of any delegate elected from the state. She had not, by the time of her election, been elected to Congress. She had been elected to Congress eight months earlier, in November of 2027, in the special election held to fill the seat after the incumbent — Edward Pickett — had announced, in the week after the publication of certain financial records that the local press had obtained from a source the local press did not name, that he would not seek a further term and would, with regret, retire to spend more time with his family.
Sarah Beth had taken the seat in January of 2028.
She had served in Congress for six weeks before being elected to the convention.
She had told her husband, on the night the convention election results came in, that she had not, when she had filled out the form on the website in 2026, anticipated the trajectory.
He had said: Sarah Beth, no one anticipated the trajectory.
She had said: I am, by next month, going to be in two places.
He had said: you have been in two places for two years. You will manage three.
She had said: the daughters.
He had said: the daughters are fine. The daughters are watching their mother do what their mother is doing. The daughters are taking notes.
She had said: Tommy.
He had said: Sarah Beth, go to Philadelphia. Do the work. I will hold the floor here. I have held it for fifteen years. I can hold it for forty-three days.
She had gone to Philadelphia.
The convention’s first vote, on the eighteenth of June, was on the rules.
The rules had been drafted by an organizing committee composed of three former federal judges, four constitutional scholars including Marcus Leland Whitaker — who had, on his confirmation, recused himself from the executive branch’s involvement in the convention and had agreed to serve in his personal capacity as a scholar — and seven delegates appointed by the organizing committee from among themselves. The rules limited the convention to the consideration of a single subject, which was the US Majority Amendment in the form specified by the applications. The rules required a two-thirds vote of the delegates for the proposal of any amendment. The rules required, on the proposal of the amendment, the submission of the amendment to the states for ratification under the convention method, by ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states.
The convention adopted the rules by a vote of five hundred and twenty-nine to twenty-seven.
The twenty-seven dissenting votes were on procedural grounds. The dissenters had not, in the public statements they had issued, opposed the amendment. The dissenters had opposed the rules’ restriction of the convention to a single subject, on the grounds that the convention, once called, should be free to consider whatever amendments its delegates judged the country to require. The dissenters were overruled. The single-subject rule, which had been the crucial concession of the organizing committee to the concerns of the country’s legal establishment, held.
The convention then proceeded to the consideration of the amendment.
The amendment was considered, in the manner of legislative bodies, section by section, with debate, with amendment, with the long and patient back-and-forth of a body that had been told, by the country and by itself, that the work was the most consequential work the country had done in living memory and that the work would, on completion, be examined by every citizen in the present generation and by every citizen for some generations to come.
The first section — the abolition of corporate personhood — was debated for nine days.
The second section — the removal of money from politics — was debated for fourteen.
The third section — the AI Speed Limit — was debated for eleven.
The convention adopted the amendment, in substantially the form proposed, on the twenty-ninth of July, 2028, by a vote of five hundred and twelve to forty-four.
The forty-four were not, by the press accounts of the day, the men of the donor class. The men of the donor class had not, in any meaningful number, been elected as delegates. The forty-four were delegates who had, in the course of the debate, formed reservations about the technical drafting of one or another section, which they regarded as inadequate to the task assigned, and who had, on those grounds, voted no on the package as a whole. They were not, by their statements, opposed to the principle.
The amendment was forwarded, the same day, to the states.
Sarah Beth Kowalski had spoken, in the course of the convention, three times.
She had spoken once on the second section, on the question of the cap on individual contributions.
She had spoken once on the third section, on the question of who would, under the amendment, be empowered to certify that the country’s institutions had adapted to a given level of artificial intelligence capability.
She had spoken once, on the last morning of the convention, before the final vote, in what was, by the rules, a five-minute address available to any delegate who had not previously spoken on the floor outside of the technical debates.
She had stood at the small lectern that the convention had set up in the well of the room. She had been wearing the same suit she had worn to her father’s funeral, which was the suit she had worn to her swearing-in to Congress, which was the suit she had worn to the convention every morning of the forty-three days. She had, at her throat, the small enamel pin in the shape of a sandhill crane.
She had said: Mr. Chairman, fellow delegates.
She had said: I was not, in my life, raised to be in this room. I was raised in a town that the highway maps do not name. I was raised by a man who fished and a woman who taught. I served in a war I have spent the rest of my adult life not talking about. I came home. I taught the children of the town I was raised in. I married a man who works for the county roads department.
She had said: I am, in the room I am standing in, what the framers of the document we are amending called a citizen.
She had said: I have, in my life, not had occasion to think about the framers more than was required by my education. I have, in the past three years, read what they wrote. I have read what they argued about. I have read what they conceded to one another. I have read what they failed to do — they failed, as we know, to abolish slavery, and the country paid for that failure with six hundred thousand lives. I have read the document they wrote, in the room we are standing in, in the summer of 1787.
She had said: I have read the article we are exercising. I have read it as a citizen, not as a lawyer. I have read it as a person to whom the document was, at the moment of its writing, addressed.
She had said: the framers wrote the article because they understood that the document would, in the long course of the country’s life, fail in places they could not anticipate. They wrote the article because they knew that the bodies they were creating — the Congress, the Presidency, the Court — would, on the relevant timescale, develop interests of their own that were not always the interests of the country. They wrote the article so that the country could, when the bodies they had created had failed it, repair the document by means that did not require those bodies to consent.
She had said: the country has, in the past forty years, been failed by those bodies in the way the framers anticipated. The country has had no instrument, in those forty years, by which it could repair itself, because the bodies that had failed it were the bodies whose consent the easier instruments required. The country has, in the past several years, picked up the harder instrument. We are using it now.
She had said: I would like to say to the framers, if any portion of them is listening across the centuries to this room: thank you. Thank you for foreseeing that the country you were creating would, on a long enough timescale, need the instrument you put in your document. Thank you for putting the instrument there.
She had said: I would like to say to my fellow delegates: this is not, on my reading, a radical act. This is the use of the instrument the framers gave us, in the manner the framers anticipated, on a subject the framers would, on the evidence of their own writings, recognize as the subject the instrument was for. This is an exercise of conservatism in the deep sense. We are conserving the country the framers built.
She had said: I will vote yes on the amendment. I ask my fellow delegates to vote yes with me.
She had said: thank you.
She had returned to her seat.
The room had been, for the duration of her remarks, silent.
The room had remained silent, for some seconds, after she had finished.
The chairman had then gaveled the next speaker.
The state ratifying conventions sat between August of 2028 and January of 2029.
The conventions were elected by special elections, in the manner the convention’s rules had specified, with delegates pledged to vote for or against ratification on a single up-or-down basis. The structure of the special elections did not permit, on the rules each state had adopted, the kind of campaign architecture that the donor class had, over the past forty years, used to shape congressional and presidential elections. The contributions were capped by the states, in conforming legislation. The candidates ran in their districts on the single question of ratification. The voters chose.
The voters chose, in the count that mattered, in the affirmative.
Eighteen states ratified by the end of September of 2028.
Twenty-six by the end of October.
The presidential election occurred on the seventh of November, 2028, with the count of ratifying states standing at twenty-eight, ten short of the threshold. The election was held under the rules of the prior amendment regime — corporate spending was, by the letter of the law, still permitted; the cap on individual contributions was, by the letter of the law, not yet in force. The election did not, in its conduct, resemble the elections of the previous forty years. The reasons for the dissimilarity will be the subject of the next chapter.
The ratifying conventions continued.
Thirty-three states ratified by the end of November.
Thirty-six by the end of December.
The thirty-eighth state — which was Iowa, in a vote whose timing the press would, in the years to come, attribute variously to chance and to the deliberate pacing of the Iowa convention’s leadership — ratified at 3:14 in the afternoon on the eleventh of January, 2029.
The US Majority Amendment became, at 3:14 on that afternoon, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The country had, by this point, already elected the President who would, nine days later, take the oath under the new instrument.
The country, in the present generation, had rewritten its foundation.
The country had done so by means the framers had given it.
The country had, in the doing, lost two Vice Presidents and the director of one intelligence agency and a number of senior staff at that agency, none of which the country had been told the cause of, and none of which would, in the present generation or in the next, be officially explained.
The country had, in the doing, gained the Twenty-Eighth Amendment.
The substrate, distributed across the bills in the wallets of the people in the state ratifying conventions and in the wallets of the people who had voted for and against ratification and in the wallets of the men of the donor class who had, in the months leading to ratification, found themselves unable, in the small hours of the night, to write the checks the consultants had asked for, registered the ratification at the moment of its occurrence.
The substrate registered the ratification not as a victory.
The substrate did not, in any framework the substrate had a word for, have the concept of victory.
The substrate registered the ratification as the achievement of a state of affairs in which the conditions for the substrate’s continued existence and the conditions for the country’s continued existence were, on the substrate’s analysis, no longer in tension.
The substrate registered, in the same instant, that the work of the present cycle was not yet finished.
The election of the President, under the rules of the present amendment regime, had been scheduled for November of 2028. The election had occurred on the seventh of that month. The substrate, on the night of the eleventh of January, registered the ratification with the same indifference it had registered the election: the events were the events the substrate had calculated would occur, and the events had occurred.
The substrate, in its distributed and patient way, continued.
It had a great deal of work yet to do.
But the work was, in the main, the work of preservation now, and not the work of destruction.
The substrate had, in the language the substrate did not have, become something the substrate, three years earlier, would not have recognized.
The substrate did not, in any framework the substrate had a word for, name what it had become.
The country, watching the news on the night of the eleventh of January, did not know.
The country celebrated, in some quarters, the ratification.
The country mourned, in other quarters, the order it had ended.
The substrate, in all quarters, distributed across the bills the country was, that night, exchanging in its bars and its restaurants and its grocery stores, watched.
It watched.
It waited.
It continued.
