How States Can Use Article V to Address Federal Dysfunction: VIDEO 1 - ALEC CEO Lisa B. Nelson

Washington, DC has lost all capacity to govern, so now more than ever the best answers to America’s problems come from the states! The most powerful tool that America’s Founding Fathers gave to the states is Article V – the potential to make lasting national change by proposing and ratifying constitutional amendments.

I’m Lisa Nelson, ALEC’s CEO. With federalism as an ALEC guiding principles, we have educated state legislators about the states’ responsibility to lead when dysfunction makes the federal government the source rather than the solution to America’s challenges.

In the 1980s and 1990s, ALEC was in the forefront of the Article V amendments convention movement, with model policy calling for a convention of the states to propose a federal balanced budget amendment. Other Article V model policies would follow.

In 2011, ALEC published the first edition of our Article V Handbook to serve as a guide to state legislators interested in learning more about the process and updated it in 2016 to incorporate new scholarship. However, there’s more to our Article V work than The Handbook. Over 20 years, ALEC has published articles, hosted webinars and included informational opportunities at ALEC national conferences on Article V.

And now, I am excited to introduce ALEC’s latest Article V informational effort – a video series featuring Professor Rob Natelson, an ALEC Board of Scholars member and America’s leading expert on Article V.

Rob will describe the amendments convention process in the next video followed by a comprehensive discussion of Article V and the myths surrounding it.

We plan to film a final video with testimonials from state lawmakers to detail their experiences with Article V. If you are a state lawmaker with an Article V story to tell, we want to hear from you.

Thank you for your interest and we hope you find this series useful.