To Convene Or Not To Convene

A friend of mine often suggests we should have a Constitutional Convention, that our system is broken and only a revamp can fix it. It's an attractive idea... but one that I think is terrible and fraught with danger.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 is what gave us our Constitution. Before that, we had something called "The Articles of Confederation."  And the Convention was supposed to discuss how to improve that document and the governance model it represented. We had, at the time, a lot of conflict between the states. Not armed conflict, of course, but conflict all the same.

Instead of amending and repairing the Articles, they wrote an entirely new document. One which has served pretty well over the years. Do we want to risk throwing it out the window?

I think the question one should ask is "What guarantee would we have that a Constitutional Convention today would not do what the first one did?" The only guarantee is that whatever the Convention came up with would have to be validated, accepted, by the existing states. I think the fight would then be over how much influence each state would have.

I do not want to see that fight. I do not trust the outcome. I am not a gambler.