America’s Constitutional Crossroads
Invitation to a Small-Group Discussion
By Prairie Gunnels and Dominic Giordano
With the Smartacus Neural Net
Draft in Development 8/24/25
On a late-winter evening in 2025, Rockford University’s auditorium filled with the subdued stir of an audience settling in. At the podium stood Dr. Patricia Lynott, the university’s president. The program was titled: America’s Hidden Constitutional Dilemma.
Lynott's greeting unfurled into an account of a series of Constitutional crises as she had lived them. Born in 1955, Lynott traced a timeline of moments when the U.S. Constitution and American democracy had been in peril.
The McCarthy era, she recalled, was “serious business,” its atmosphere seeping into her childhood. Her great-aunt, Irene Wicker — a radio and television personality in New York and Chicago — had been named in Red Channels. Kellogg’s, her sponsor, dropped her. Cleared eventually by the House Un-American Activities Committee, she never recovered her career.
“Even as a little kid,” Lynott said, “I understood that something with our government had to be protected, and that the Constitution was the thing that was going to protect us.”
We’re inviting up to 50 students and faculty at Skidmore College and Rockford University to join an AI-mediated small-group discussion focused on constitutional renewal. This conversation hosted by Rockford University last February will serve as our “centering anchor.” The main points are summarized in th Briefing Doc you’ll find here.
From there, she moved briskly through the decades: the Civil Rights Movement and Selma; Watergate in the ’70s, when the Supreme Court stepped in to check the executive branch; Iran-Contra in the ’80s, another test of executive power; the contested Bush v. Gore election in 2000, seen by many as judicial overreach; the Patriot Act after 9/11, when the balance between national security and civil liberties again came into question.
“Today, in 2025,” she said, “in an era of unprecedented divisions, it feels like the principles enshrined in our Constitution are more at risk than ever before, at least in my lifetime.” The Constitution, she reminded her listeners, was “not about partisanship; it is about citizenship.”
The panel assembled that night reflected a range of legal and scholarly backgrounds.
Dean Joe Kearney of Marquette University Law School, recognized for his record in appellate briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court, sat alongside Professor Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University, whose career included directing Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution and work with the Heritage Foundation.
Moderating was Professor Ron Lee of Rockford University, known for his constitutional law courses and his award-winning curriculum work at Keith Country Day School.
Russ Feingold
But the central figure was former Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of The Constitution in Jeopardy. With family roots in Janesville, Wisconsin, going back to 1917, Feingold recalled local connections — including a post at Marquette offered by Kearney after his 2010 Senate loss.
President of the American Constitution Society until he stepped down in March, Feingold described the core argument of his book in terms of “twin jeopardies”:
first, that a constitutional convention could “go haywire,” producing destabilizing changes to the nation’s fundamental law;
second, that the Constitution was “the hardest constitution in the world to amend” through congressional means, a difficulty compounded by political polarization.
Feingold traced the origins of Article V. The framers, he said, were unusually forward-looking in providing an amendment mechanism at all. George Washington had supported the Constitution in part because it allowed for future change, observing, “I do not think we are more inspired, have more wisdom, or possess more virtue than those who will come after us.”
But the process that emerged was arduous. Amendments could come either from two-thirds of Congress or from a convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, but all twenty-seven ratified amendments had originated in Congress. The convention route had “absolutely no rules or provisions or any information at all about how it should be done.”
In recent years, Feingold said, the “Convention of States” movement — well-funded and conservative — had been working to make it happen. Since 2013, its organizers had trained prospective delegates and staged mock conventions. Their “one vote per state” rule, regardless of population, reminded him of the pre-Constitution system under the Articles of Confederation. It was possible, he warned, for a majority of state legislators — themselves products of heavily gerrymandered systems — to “gut the power of our national legislature in a way that reminds me of John C. Calhoun’s nullification doctrine.”
Feingold laid out what such a convention could attempt: a balanced budget amendment, term limits for Congress and the judiciary, and jurisdictional limits on the branches of government. The danger, he stressed, was that it could also sweep far beyond its stated aims — to ban abortion, eliminate birthright citizenship, or overturn campaign finance rulings — with no clear rules about delegates, procedures, or judicial oversight. “There are simply no rules about how this thing should be set up,” he said. “It’s a constitutional crisis.”
Kearney’s response was careful. He acknowledged the concern (his emailed reaction to Feingold’s book had been, “An Article 5 convention: Yikes!”), but noted the ratification requirement: three-fourths of the states would have to approve any changes. That, he argued, was a safeguard. While the issue was alarming, he said, it was “not a partisan issue” and should be considered from all political perspectives.
Bernick agreed with Feingold’s diagnosis of risk but saw it as a symptom of deeper structural issues. That the public feared “oligarchical capture” of a constitutional process, he argued, suggested the Constitution “is not firing on all cylinders.”
Article V, he said, was a form of “bloodless revolution,” but one constrained by a design that privileged the states over direct popular will. The framers, seeking to prevent “rampant majorities” like those in Shays’ Rebellion, had insulated government from popular control, a point Jefferson had criticized. The most transformative change — the 14th Amendment — had been ratified under Reconstruction only by forcing the issue on Southern states.
Feingold acknowledged the frustration fueling the convention movement, especially on the right, where the federal government was seen as “too big” and unaccountable. Gerrymandered state legislatures, he noted, could use their control to appoint ideologically aligned delegates.
As the discussion drew to a close, Feingold returned to his second jeopardy — the difficulty of amendment — and floated a reform: any amendment should be approved both by a popular vote in a majority of states and by a national popular vote. It would, he said, bring the process closer to “We the People.”
Bernick offered his own closing: that whatever its flaws, the Constitution remained the operative framework for social movements and freedom struggles. “Use the Constitution regardless of its imperfections,” he said.
The night ended without resolution, but the subject — an Article V convention, obscure to many before they walked in — had been brought into sharper focus. The Constitution’s fragility, its resilience, and the uncertain line between the two lingered in the air as the audience left, the questions unresolved but the stakes unmistakable.
Our Invitation to Skidmore and Rockford Students and Faculty
We invite up to 50 students and faculty at Skidmore College and Rockwell University to join us in a small-group discussion using a ChatGPT-based template introduced by Peter Bowden, founder of Meaning Spark Labs. This will be our first test and demonstration of the Decentralized Community Project — a framework designed to foster meaningful, peer-to-peer civic conversations. This Briefing Doc generated by NotebookLM outlines the main points.
To learn more and join this conversation, please drop us a note below.
