Former U.S. Senator will be the Constitution Day Speaker

Russ Feingold, President of the American Constitution Society and former U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was the Constitution Day Speaker at the Center for Constitutional Design at ASU Law on Thursday, September 13, 2023.

Senator Feingold published a book last year called “The Constitution in Jeopardy,” about his concerns surrounding the movement to invoke an Article V Constitutional Convention to amend the Constitution.

He also addressed the question about how we might update the process for amending the Constitution, which has proved challenging lately.

“In modern decades, there have been mostly Conservative movements that have been seeking a Constitutional Convention to either get a balanced budget amendment or more disturbingly, gut the whole Constitution,” Senator Feingold said.

“They passed and cheered wildly the idea that the majority of the state legislatures can simply vote to override any act of Congress or any administrative rule, just by the majority vote of twenty-six states, that would greatly weaken the ability of our country to function as a whole,” Senator Feingold said.

It is difficult to pass Constitution Amendments the regular way, we need to get rid of the Electoral College and no provision that has to do with the environment according to Senator Feingold.

“We can’t fix this document, it requires two-thirds of both Houses so we need to figure out to get both sides in order to be able to change the Constitution or else it’s going to die and divide,” Senator Feingold said.