Amid Threats to Rewrite The Constitution, Senator Wiener Calls For Rescinding California’s Calls for Constitutional Convention To Protect Civil Liberties & Democracy

SACRAMENTO – Today, Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) introduced SCR 1, a resolution to rescind all seven of California’s previous calls for a Constitutional Convention. The resolution protects Californians from right-wing extremist attempts to trigger a Constitutional Convention and then rewrite the Constitution to strip away core liberties and protections. Senators Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) and Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) are co-authoring the resolution.

In recent years, Donald Trump’s allies and Republican leaders in Congress have repeatedly attempted to trigger a Constitutional Convention. Just this weekend, Trump appeared to call for rewriting the Constitution to strip people born in the U.S. of citizenship if their parents were not citizens.

With over two dozen states calling for a Constitutional Convention and Congress under the control of Trump’s allies, the risk of convening a convention that rewrites the Constitution and eliminates core protections and liberties is greater than ever. California needs to take steps to reduce the risk of a convention happening.

“The damage a Constitutional Convention could do to Californians’ basic rights is off the charts,” said Senator Wiener. “There are no guardrails once a Constitutional Convention has been triggered: Once it begins, extremists could easily hijack it and drive the Convention to strip protections for women, LGBTQ people, workers, immigrants, or any number of other groups, while undermining democracy and locking in the power of the largest corporations on the planet. California must do its part to prevent this chaos, and we must not allow our state’s previous calls for a Constitutional Convention to be co-opted by efforts to throw out the Constitution in pursuit of an extreme right-wing agenda.”

"There is little evidence that Article V constitutional conventions can be limited to a single subject, meaning any call for a convention poses an inadvertent danger to our democratic institutions and basic rights," said Jonathan Mehta Stein, the Executive Director at California Common Cause. "California should follow the lead of states like Oregon, New York, and Illinois and rescind our previous calls for a constitutional convention. We applaud Senator Weiner’s efforts with this legislation."

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is required to hold a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures (34 states) call for one. Three quarters of states (38 states) would have to ratify any changes to the Constitution that a Convention produced.

While many calls for a Constitutional Convention, including California’s various calls over the years, are limited to a single subject, nothing in the Constitution explicitly allows for a subject-matter-limited Constitutional Convention. Once a Convention convenes, it could attempt to rewrite any provision in the Constitution. Moreover, the Constitution does not indicate how a convention is constituted in terms of membership, voting rights, representation by states, and so forth. Thus, a right wing Congress could convene a constitutional convention and set procedural rules that are rigged in favor of extremists.

In recent years, a movement pushing for a constitutional convention has gained momentum in conservative states and in Congress. Twenty-eight states currently have open calls for various constitutional conventions.

In 2022 and 2023, U.S. Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX-19), Chair of the House Budget Committee, introduced resolutions calling for Congress to convene a Constitutional Convention. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum recently began canvassing statehouses across the country urging Republican-controlled Legislatures to pass calls for a Constitutional Convention. The idea is also supported by John Eastman, a Trump advisor who has been criminally indicted for authoring a legal memo detailing a plan for President Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Indivisible CA: State Strong issued a statement in support of SCR 1: “We at Indivisible CA: State Strong strongly support Sen. Wiener's SCR 1, which, if passed, would be an important contribution toward national efforts to dissuade a rogue Congress from calling a dangerous constitutional convention that could re-write the US Constitution without constraint.”

California would not be the first state to rescind calls for constitutional convention. For example, of the five states who have passed the resolution calling for a limited convention relating to campaign finance reform, two states have since voted to rescind all previous calls for a constitutional convention (New Jersey in 2021 and Illinois in 2022).

California currently has seven outstanding calls for a Constitutional Convention, the oldest dating from 1911 and the latest from 2023. SCR 1 would rescind all of them, in an effort to preclude California’s calls from being used to trigger a Constitutional Convention.

"Constitutional conventions put every right, civil liberty, and underlying value of our country at risk. There are no limits or guardrails on what provisions can be changed by a convention, and it opens the door to well-funded special interests buying access to change the Constitution to serve their purposes," said Dora Rose, Deputy Director of the League of Women Voters of California, which is sponsoring SCR 1. "This is not a partisan issue - lawmakers from both parties in a number of states have rejected calls for an Article V convention due to its uncontrollable risks. And Justice Antonin Scalia has likewise warned of its unpredictability. A constitutional convention could be used to upend our democracy in a variety of ways that we would live to regret. Rescinding California’s past calls for constitutional conventions is one step toward insulating us from emerging threats to our most fundamental rights and liberties."

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