The Far-Right Plot to Hijack the Constitution — and How to Stop It
A small, well-funded network is using the real $39 trillion debt as cover to rewrite our founding document. Here’s how the cross-partisan pro-democracy coalition must respond.
On March 18, 2026, the U.S. House voted 211 to 207 to advance a Balanced Budget Amendment — short of the two-thirds needed to pass. The same day, the national debt crossed $39 trillion, roughly 125 percent of GDP. A day later, the Trump administration announced it would seek up to $200 billion more for its war against Iran.
The fiscal alarm is warranted. And that is what makes this moment so dangerous — because a small, well-funded network is using that alarm as cover for a plan to rewrite the Constitution itself and lock Project 2025 into it permanently. If they succeed, the changes could not be reversed by any future election, Congress, or Supreme Court.
Here is what is happening on two tracks being run by the far right — and what every American who believes in self-government by the people must do.
Track one: a lawsuit built on fuzzy math
Two days after that House vote, former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker and Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke wrote in Fortune that state attorneys general should sue Congress now to force it to call an Article V constitutional convention.
Their theory, pushed by the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation, goes like this: by 1979, enough states had filed applications for a convention that Congress has been in violation of the Constitution for forty-six years and must be ordered by a federal court to call one. They reach that number by mixing old applications from wildly different eras — a New York petition from 1789, an Illinois resolution from the eve of the Civil War, Wisconsin’s 1929 call to repeal Prohibition — and adding them to modern balanced-budget applications as if American history were one continuous transaction.
Liberal and conservative scholars alike have called this theory “wild,” “completely illegitimate,” and “deeply flawed.”
And yet the theory is being dressed in official clothing. In September 2025, a body called the National Federalism Commission — created in 2017 and whose Article V research library is named for a consultant to the Federal Fiscal Sustainability Foundation itself —issued a report endorsing the count, which was entered into the Congressional Record at a December 2025 House Judiciary hearing. House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington’s H.Con.Res.15, which would have Congress call the convention directly on the same theory, waits in committee.
Track two: the Convention of States campaign
A parallel grassroots track has been running for over a decade under Convention of States Action, led by Tea Party co-founder Mark Meckler. Their resolution is not limited to the debt. It calls for a convention to “limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government” — language so broad it can mean almost anything.
As of 2026, the Convention of States resolution has passed in twenty state legislatures, with Kansas the newest. Fourteen more states are considering it this year, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Washington. Trump regime cabinet endorsers include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The Heritage Foundation — author of Project 2025 — has formally endorsed the Article V convention push.
We know what they want to do inside such a convention, because they have told us. Their 2016 and 2023 mock conventions produced trial-run amendments that would transfer vast federal lands to the states, require a two-thirds congressional supermajority to raise any tax, and severely restrict the Commerce Clause — the constitutional basis for most civil rights, labor, environmental, and consumer protections of the last century.
Under existing state rules, one party would hold sole control of at least twenty-eight state delegations. Each state gets one vote regardless of population. That is a fake supermajority before the gavel even falls.
Why this moment is uniquely dangerous
Such a convention would not land in a neutral environment. It would land inside the Trump/MAGA/Project 2025 regime — a regime already testing the elastic limits of executive power by ignoring congressional spending decisions, refusing to enforce laws it dislikes, and deploying federal troops into American cities.
A right-wing hijack of a constitutional convention gives this movement something executive orders never can: permanence. President Trump has not yet formally endorsed the effort. Many close to him, including the Speaker of the House, have. If he does, the red and purple states still holding out may find resistance untenable.
Under existing state rules and their uncanny aggregation theory, Republicans need only a handful of additional purple-state chambers to push the combined count across the 34-state threshold. Six more wins in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Arizona could do it.
The defensive firewall is working
Ordinary citizens and state legislators are pushing back, and it is working.
Since Wisconsin Watch exposed the draft lawsuit a year ago, Connecticut and Washington rescinded their Article V applications in 2025. Massachusetts leaders filed rescission resolutions in October 2025. In February 2026, an Alaska representative introduced HJR 41 to rescind every previous Alaska application — and Alaska was the only state publicly named on the FFSF draft lawsuit. Common Cause and its partners are tracking related bills in forty-two states.
The convention architects are treating the Constitution like a lapsed contract they can reactivate on their own. The rescission movement is keeping consent alive.
The real alternative: deliberation, not ambush
We do not have to choose between ignoring a $39 trillion fiscal crisis and letting the authors of Project 2025 rewrite our founding document. That is a false choice.
There is a third path, and it is already underway. It is called the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign to Renew American Democracy — a cross-partisan coalition building towards Citizens’ Assemblies drawn by lot from the full range of the American people, working under transparent rules, supported by independent experts, and ratified through open state conventions of the kind that ratified the 21st Amendment.
It is the opposite of a right-wing closed room of state-legislator-appointed delegates voting one-state-one-vote on amendments drafted in advance by ALEC. It is sortition by the people, not sortition by the gerrymandered.
A call to action across the partisan spectrum
This threat cuts across the usual lines, and the response must too.
Principled Conservatives who care about constitutional fidelity: oppose a lawsuit built on counting a Prohibition-era resolution as a 2026 convention call. Moderates and Independents who want a government that works: reject a convention rigged to lock one party’s policies into the founding document. Progressives watching civil rights and labor protections weakened in court after court: fight a process expressly targeting the Commerce Clause. Libertarians and federalists who take the Tenth Amendment seriously: oppose a closed-room rewrite by delegates no citizen ever voted for.
The window is now. Here is what you can do this week:
Find out whether your state has active, unrescinded Article V applications. If it does, organize for rescission with Common Cause.
If your state is considering a Convention of States resolution in 2026, show up at the hearings and block it.
Press your state attorney general, publicly and in writing, to disavow any FFSF-affiliated lawsuit.
Join the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign to Renew American Democracy and help build the affirmative vision by the people — real citizen deliberation culminating in Citizens’ Assemblies, genuine constitutional renewal through the living consent of the living people.
Revolutionary optimism is not the belief that things will work out. It is the practice of organizing as if they can, and doing the work. The debt is real. The fiscal alarm is warranted. The cure being offered by the right-wing is an ambush. We can do better — and we already are.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, is a preventive medicine physician, epidemiologist, ordained Song of Songs Rabbi, and founder of #unifyUSA and co-initiator of Renew American Democracy (RAD) movements, a new catalyzing platform. He is the author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He delivered the TEDxPrinceton talk “Peacecrafting: From Conflict to Collaboration” in February 2026.
There are a number of things which we could do to create a more democratic constitution. My preferences is to restore the democratic founding of 1776, which was essentially overthrown by the oligarchic and largely aristocratic counterrevolution of 1788. In my view the proper response to the widespread abuse of power and corruption is to abolish the current constitution and to peacefully ratify a new one which is, I hope and pray, a more democratic and more effective one. I believe state and local assemblies could play a huge part in that process but that those assemblies must be focused on making democratic improvements to our political system, deliberated over in a national convention of the people and ratified by the people of the United States they national special election.
As always, I love your optimism! When you write that a refreshed Constitution can be "ratified through open state conventions of the kind that ratified the 21st Amendment," is your theory of change that (like the 21st amendment) 2/3rds of Congress will vote to send your amendments to the states? Because that's the only Constitutional way to get state ratifying conventions, and such Congressional harmony seems unlikely at this point.