Live from Music Row, Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Tennessee State Representative Chris Todd (R-Jackson) to the newsmaker line to discuss his proposed resolution to call an Article Five convention to set Congressional term limits.
Leahy: The Tennessee General Assembly will convene at noon today in the State Capitol here in Nashville. And one of the 99 members of the Tennessee House of Representatives who will be sworn in for that session is State Representative Chris Todd from Jackson. He’s on the newsmaker line with us right now. Good morning, Representative Todd.
Todd: Good morning, Michael. How are you today?
Leahy: Are you in the car driving towards Nashville, or are you here already?
Todd: I’m here already. I came up last night. Had an opportunity to get here last night, so today wouldn’t be as big a rush. I’ve got a few meetings lined up for this morning, and it’s kind of like a pre-game show, I guess, now before kick-off at noon.
Leahy: Yes, a pre-game show. And you are back in the saddle again! What’s it feel like to come back? How many other sessions of the Tennessee General Assembly have you participated in as a state representative?
Todd: This will be my third session, so I’m starting my fifth year.
Leahy: What do you see on the horizon? What are your big plans, your big agenda for this session of the Tennessee General Assembly?
Todd: You mentioned the excitement, and one of the things that’s most exciting to me is that we, the people, are again getting to speak their voices. Since we adjourned in April, there have been a number of things come up that the people, our citizens, the folks that are actually in charge, have seen that need to be fixed or tweaked.
And so they have been bending our ears for months saying, this is what we would like. And so that’s what we’re here to do. It is their business to represent them truly. I’m excited about that.
One of the things I continue to hear about is how we have folks running the U.S. Congress that have been there for decades, many of them, and we need some type of limit on their tenure.
Term limits are something that folks are demanding in Congress. And as you and I both know, without a lot of pressure, Congress isn’t going to act on that. They don’t want to limit their terms and their ability to keep power.
Leahy: What specifically will you be doing on term limits? Will you be passing a resolution supporting it? Will you be asking the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C., to pass basically a constitutional amendment that will then go forward to the states for ratification? What’s your plan?
Todd: Our Founders were extremely wise, as you know, in writing our Constitution, the basis of our laws and governance in this country. And they put a provision in Article Five of our Constitution that says that anytime the people want to create an amendment to the Constitution or make a change to the Constitution, they have a mechanism.
Their representatives in their given states can call for an Article Five convention to propose amendments for certain purposes. And so I plan to once again run an amendment or a resolution rather, that would call for an Article Five convention where delegates from all of the states would convene at a set time and place that Congress has to set.
Once we have 34 states call for this resolution, then Congress is ordered at that point to set a time and place for a convention. Then the delegates meet, and if they come up with a consensus on a particular amendment to the Constitution, then they have to bring that back to the states for ratification. Then it would take 38 states to ratify that. Any kind of change to the Constitution must go through that process if it is not initiated in Congress.
Personally, I believe once we have close to 34 states calling for a convention, Congress actually will probably have their hand forced and do that themselves. They’d rather be in control of that process than to let folks from the 50 states make that decision for their tenure.
Leahy: There are a couple of ways to have an amendment passed and ratified in the Constitution. One way is for Congress to pass a joint resolution by a two-thirds vote in each House passing that amendment, and then it goes to three-fourths of the states for ratification.
Or you can hold this convention, and if the convention supports an amendment, then it goes for ratification. To go the Article Five route, which has never been used in American history, you need two-thirds of state legislatures to call for an Article Five convention. Where are we right now? Thirty-four is a magic number. How many states have requested Article Five conventions to date?
Todd: I don’t have the current number, and there are folks that are looking right now at some historical documents, especially back in the 70s, because things were not online then, as you well know. You remember some of those, like me, and these resolutions have been lost because they’re not online, they’re not searchable.
There’s an effort going on to determine if there have already been 34 states calling for either a convention on term limits or a convention on a balanced budget. Those are two of the most popular ones that have been passed many times over the years. But currently, I do not know for sure what the number is.
Leahy: Yes, I think it’s still significantly short of 34. And the other caveat on this, as you mentioned, you can have a general call for an Article Five convention, or you can have a call for an Article Five convention and limit it to a specific topic. Is that what your plan is, to call for an Article Five convention solely to consider term limits?
Todd: That’s exactly my goal. Yes. And we have a dedicated delegate law in Tennessee that our delegates must do what the legislature instructs them to do for any kind of convention that they’re attending like that.
Leahy: What do you think the odds are that your proposal will pass in this session of the Tennessee General Assembly?
Todd: I like to be optimistic because if you poll the citizens of the state of Tennessee, you’re going to get upwards of 70 percent support for this very thing. And I would hope that their representatives and their senators would be mindful of that and would respond to that type of demand. I passed this in the House last year, and I feel like I should be able to get that passed again.
The senate stalled it. There were some cold feet over there. We have some very good groups out there that have been opposing any kind of Article Five convention for various reasons.
And when you just sit down and discuss that with them and you lay out the facts about an Article Five convention, I have found that many of them will fold their hands and say, well, we’re going to continue to be against it because we’ve always been against it. And forget the facts, forget the reasoning, forget what our Founders laid out. We don’t trust the process, and we’re just going to be against it.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Chris Todd” by Chris Todd for State Representative.
I would agree to a COS if it was limited to term limits and repealing the bastardized 17th amendment..legislators pick the senators. And an additional amendment that all ballots need to be on paper, no machines, one day only!
Term limits; an amazingly dreadful idea that simply won’t go away.