Constitutional convention’s benefits outweigh cost | Opinion

J.H. Snider is the editor of The Rhode Island State Constitutional Convention Clearinghouse.

Many have correctly said that Donald Trump has weird obsessions with crowd sizes and other matters. Well, Rhode Island government has a weird obsession with constitutional convention costs, albeit one that merely mimics the talking points of convention opponents who oppose a “yes” vote on Rhode Island’s Nov. 5 referendum on whether to call a convention.

Experts who do serious public policy analysis usually try to explicitly balance the potential benefits and costs of a proposed policy. But that’s not how Rhode Island’s legislature, via its appointed and constitutionally mandated “preparatory commission,” has framed the problem. The same goes for the secretary of state, who is responsible for summarizing the convention referendum in a voter handbook mailed at taxpayer expense to all registered voters.

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In their 2004 and 2014 reports to Rhode Island’s people, the last two preparatory commissions quantified the potential costs but not benefits of a convention. Rhode Island’s secretary of state then mimicked that type of biased analysis in his ballot summary mailed to all Rhode Island voters.

The government’s cost findings were then ubiquitously cited in the media and, most influentially, cited in the “no” side’s pervasive advertising in the weeks before the referendum. The message was: if a convention has only costs and risks, only a fool would vote for one. 

I don’t object to the government’s attempt to quantify a convention’s potential costs if it makes a similar attempt to quantify its potential benefits. For example, the state’s budget for the 2025 fiscal year, excluding local government, is $14 billion, which translates to $140 billion over the 10-year budgeting cycle between convention calls. This should raise the question: what is a convention’s break-even point if it reduces government waste? For example, how much waste could a truly independent inspector general eliminate?  (The legislature has repeatedly refused to create such an inspector general.)

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Using the current preparatory commission’s heroic assumptions to arrive at a top $4.8 million cost for a convention, that would imply a convention break-even cost of just .000034%. Thus, if a convention’s efforts at improving democratic accountability reduced government waste by just .1%/year, that would result in a 292 times (29,200%) return on investment. And this, mind you, when the Gallup poll has found that Americans think their state governments waste 42% of every dollar spent.

So what’s the strategy used to justify discounting a convention’s potential benefits? The primary one is the claim that the legislature can do everything a convention can without those costs. But this is a bald-faced distortion of both the convention’s democratic design and purpose since Massachusetts pioneered the first convention in 1779. This convention featured independently elected convention delegates to propose constitutional changes followed by popular ratification because the people recognized their legislature would have a blatant conflict of interest designing its own powers and those of competing branches of government. This argument was so compelling that Congress soon mandated conventions for all new states.

Even in the current era of constitutional amendment rather than inauguration, the convention process remains, in most states, the legal gold standard for constitutional change-making. To take the extreme example, New Hampshire, which had 10 unlimited conventions during the 20th century, wouldn’t even allow the legislature to propose constitutional amendments until 1964. U.S. states have held 236 conventions.

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As evidenced by a 2023 University of Rhode Island poll that found only 10% of Rhode Islanders had a lot or great deal of trust in the state legislature, there remains a compelling reason for this institution, which, like the popular initiative available in 24 states, prevents the legislature from having monopoly power over constitutional change proposals. The preparatory commission’s just-released 2024 report has once again studiously ignored this legislature bypass purpose of a convention.

So the legislature’s taxpayer-funded obsession with a constitution’s cost should be called out as not only weird but biased to preserve its power at the people’s expense.