It would take 34 states to approve such a constituational convention. A tea party too far?

Call it a movement within a movement.

Small pockets of tea party activists across the country are trying to build momentum for a modern-day constitutional convention, ramping up pressure on Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment and address the debt crisis.


It would take 34 states to approve such a convention, so it remains more of a theoretical exercise than a real threat to the Constitution. Yet at least 30 state legislatures, including Texas, Missouri and Virginia, are mulling over resolutions either calling for a national Article V convention or urging Congress to propose changes to the Constitution.

The grass-roots movement, however, is encountering some unlikely resistance from some of the tea party’s biggest stars in Washington.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, the House Tea Party Caucus chairwoman who’s entertaining a run for the White House, is adamantly opposed to the idea of a convention, saying there’s already a “successful” process for Congress to amend the Constitution.

Freshman Sen. Mike Lee of Utah has threatened to filibuster any increase to the debt ceiling unless the government is forced to balance its budget each year. But Lee, a constitutional scholar, fears a runaway convention where unlimited changes could be made to the founding document — an argument the far-right John Birch Society and Eagle Forum have been making for decades.

Other tea party types are reluctant to jump into the fray. Freshman Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said he hadn’t studied the issue enough to render an opinion, though he was a former Florida House speaker and the state Senate last month passed a resolution requesting a convention. And South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint took a pass when asked if a convention was a good idea.

“I’m gonna reserve judgment on that one,” he told POLITICO.

The divide between the grass-roots tea party desires and the Washington tea partiers represents something of a new rift within the movement. Activists back home are still ready for revolution, while the folks they sent to Washington are increasingly cautious.

Even freshman Sen. Rand Paul, who made a passionate plea for a convention before Kentucky state lawmakers, seemed more enthralled by the effects such a convention would have on Congress rather than the gathering itself.

“Anything to push this body up here to balance the budget is good, and I don’t think we ever will unless we have a constitutional convention,” Paul, who founded the Senate Tea Party Caucus with DeMint and Lee, told POLITICO.

While tea party groups are staunchly opposed to a full-fledged rewriting of the Constitution, a handful have begun promoting an Article V convention that would be limited to specific issues — things like a balanced-budget amendment or a proposal that hands states the sole authority to raise the federal debt limit.

They’re pushing the convention in online tea party forums. They’re taking to radio airwaves in Texas. And they’re hitting the road, making their pitch to tea party groups around Arizona. Many of their arguments can be traced to the Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based libertarian think tank that released a report last fall advocating for a convention in the face of fiscal gridlock in Washington.

“This is the last peaceful means for citizens to try to get control of the government again,” said Lee Earle of the Arizona 2012 Project, a tea party group that has worked with the institute. “It is the eject button, the escape switch.”

Mac McDowell, a spokesman for the San Antonio Tea Party, said the proposed convention’s chilly reception on Capitol Hill — even among anti-Washington tea party heroes — highlights the power struggle between states and the federal government.

“For inside-the-Beltway power brokers, anything that strips Congress of power, they are opposed to,” said McDowell, who has his own conservative radio talk show. “With a convention, Congress becomes very limited in what they can do. They don’t want to surrender that power.”

However, chances of convening an Article V convention — a reference to the section of the Constitution that outlines how to amend the document — remain slim.

Thirty-four state legislatures, or two-thirds, would need to pass the same resolution calling for a first-of-its-kind convention to amend the Constitution. And it takes 38 statehouses to ratify any proposed amendment, an even higher bar.

Then there’s the challenge of getting all the states on the same page.

“Their calls for a convention aren’t exactly the same, they’ve happened at different times, and some states have gone back and rescinded their calls, so there are all sorts of legal issues that arise,” said Brenda Erickson, a senior research analyst at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Denver.

Still, activity at the state level has been rampant this year. The Texas state Senate overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for a convention if Congress does not pass a balanced-budget amendment by year’s end. But the resolution is stalled in a House committee. That’s the case in Kentucky as well.

A similar resolution failed in the Arizona Senate after legislators deadlocked 15-15.

In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has called for a convention to require the federal government to balance its books, saying: “It’s time for Washington to follow the lead of the states and operate within a balanced budget.”

Meanwhile, the North Dakota Senate passed a resolution requesting a national convention to propose an amendment that any increase in the federal debt limit must be approved by a majority of the states.

Both Bachmann and Lee said there’s a better alternative for amending the Constitution — one that’s been used 27 times. Two-thirds of both houses of Congress can pass an amendment, then three-fourths of state legislatures must ratify it to make it law.

“I think we have a magnificent Constitution now, and I think that we should live under it,” Bachmann told POLITICO.

“The problem has been the Congress and the Supreme Court and the president have not always acted within the confines of the Constitution,” she added. “If they do act within the jurisdictional limitations, then a constitutional convention is unnecessary.”

Lee has joined all 47 GOP senators in backing a balanced budget amendment proposal, though it likely lacks the 20 Democratic votes needed to clear the two-thirds threshold. Still, Lee said a convention is not "necessary or desirable."

"Congress has historically been nervous, with good reason, about calls for a constitutional convention, because last time we had [one, in 1787], we emerged with a completely different document," Lee said. That document, the U.S. Constitution, was "fortunately a very good one, but people are nervous to open up the whole process again."