In his July 10, 2025, commentary, “Calling On The Eagle Forum To Add to Its Legacy of Liberty,” RealClearMarkets Editor John Tamny seeks Eagle Forum’s support of a constitutional convention (aka Con-Con) with the goal of pushing Congress to support term limits for the federal legislature. However well-intentioned his call for our support of a Con-Con is, Phyllis Schlafly clearly outlined the threats inherent in using such a convention to amend the Constitution.
Mr. Tamny rightly acknowledges Phyllis’s role in bringing “the ideas of limited government into the mainstream of America’s national conversation” and planting the seeds of the Reagan Revolution. But her fealty was not simply to smaller government but to “the miracle of our great United States Constitution,” as she put it.
That is why we at Eagle Forum will carry on her legacy by following her admonition to never “allow our great Constitution to be jeopardized by calling a national Convention at a time when so many special-interest groups want to rewrite it in different ways,” despite Mr. Tamny’s suggestion that we do just that in furtherance of term limits.
But that would be the equivalent of burning down the forest to save the trees. And we know those who play with fire get burned. Phyllis cautioned the nation in 1996, saying, “State Legislatures cannot put out the fire once ignited, cannot control its spread, and cannot control the winds that will fan this fire in ways we cannot now foresee.”
Though voters today are frustrated with Congress and have disdain for career politicians, this is not new. Term limits for Congress have been a popular fix for the problem of unresponsive legislators for decades. Even so, Congress has failed to pass a term limits constitutional amendment despite its consistent support. Frustration over their refusal caused the term limits movement to alter its approach back in 1995 to instead have state legislatures call for a constitutional convention to force Congress’s hand.
Phyllis Schlafly was the first to call this new strategy a “wrong turn” by the term limits folks. And we still believe that today. Mr. Tamny is correct to note that our “lack of support” for a convention for proposing amendments (as it is referred to in Article V of the Constitution) “isn’t so much rooted in opposition to term limits as it is rooted in a fear of … a runaway convention.” Yes, we do fear losing our carefully crafted Constitution. Even James Madison shared our concern. He wrote, “Having witnessed the difficulties and dangers experienced by the first Convention, which assembled under every propitious circumstance, I should tremble for the result of a second.”
Phyllis wrote eloquently and consistently from 1986 until her death in 2016 about the threats to our beautiful Constitution from a constitutional convention, Con-Con, Article V Convention, and/or Convention of States. Its backers changed the name each time she succeeded in exposing its dangers. Her decades of opposition to the concept can be found here on Eagle Forum’s website.
Her reasons are just as relevant, if not more so, today: such a conclave, for which there is no precedent and therefore no governing rules “would throw confusion, uncertainty, and court cases around our governmental process by opening up our entire Constitution to be picked apart by special-interest groups that want various changes. It would make America look foolish in the eyes of the world, unsettle our financial markets, and force all of us to re-fight the same battles that the Founding Fathers so brilliantly won in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.”
Phyllis further noted, “Nobody can predict what the rules or the agenda of a new Constitutional Convention would be.” Mr. Tamny seems to agree with this by stating that we shouldn’t be worried because a convention “will never happen – and doesn’t need to.” The entire Article V Convention of States movement, he tacitly admits, is nothing more than a multi-million dollar “fake.” Their goal is not to assemble a meeting of delegates from all 50 States, but only to threaten to do so. The real power, he says, “is in the pressure – not the convention itself.”
But what good is a strategy if you’ve already told your opponent you don’t mean it? Is there integrity in spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars to lobby state legislatures to pass resolutions that are only for show? Would not the money being poured into these efforts by anonymous donors be better spent on amending our Constitution in the way that has been successful 27 other times before?
We appreciate Mr. Tamny’s kind words recognizing that our Eagles “have done so much for so long in the cause of liberty” and that our principled perspective is held in high regard by conservative state legislatures. This is precisely why we will follow Phyllis’s wise warning to “reject all proposals for a Constitutional Convention, no matter how worthy the issue.” We will not burn down her legacy of liberty for a smoke and mirrors strategy.
