Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

New Hampshire Asks Every Ten Years Whether to Rewrite Its Constitution. The Country Never Has To.

The state’s founders built reconsideration into the machinery of government and put the next vote on the 2032 ballot. So I drafted a constitution for the country, and the exercise exposed a question it has stopped letting itself ask.

In November 2032, every New Hampshire voter will find the same plain question waiting near the bottom of the ballot: “Shall there be a convention to amend or revise the constitution?” The wording has barely changed in more than two centuries. The state asks it on a fixed schedule, ready or not, whether or not anyone is demanding it.

Full disclosure: the proposed national constitution discussed here is my own. I wrote it, along with an annotated companion defending each of its breaks from the 1787 text, as a thought experiment. It is a draft built for argument, not a piece of pending legislation, and nothing in it is current law.

The people’s house. The State House in Concord, opened 1819 — the oldest U.S. capitol where the legislature still meets in its original chambers. Photo: Quintin Soloviev, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

That question is not an accident of history. New Hampshire’s founders wrote a standing invitation to reconsider into the constitution itself, and they backed it with a right most Americans have never read. The federal government has no equivalent. There is no decade when the country is required to stop and ask whether its founding rules still fit the people living under them. I wanted to know what that missing question would surface if someone took it seriously, so I sat down and wrote a replacement constitution for the whole country. What the work turned up was less about my draft than about a habit we have let go of.

A question on the 2032 ballot

New Hampshire was the first of the original colonies to adopt its own constitution and the first to hold a constitutional convention. The current charter took effect in 1784, and it carries a mechanism the U.S. Constitution does not. Part Second, Article 100 directs the secretary of state to place the convention question on the general-election ballot at least once every ten years. Voters last saw it in 2022 and turned it down, two to one. By the calendar, it comes back in 2032.

The question, as voters will see it. Wording set by Part Second, Article 100. Returns November 2032. Graphic: GSR.

The schedule means the state never drifts far from the question of its own design. A generation that wants to leave the document alone can vote no, as New Hampshire’s has done more than once. The point is that the choice gets forced into the open on a regular clock, instead of being left to whoever can clear an extraordinary threshold in a moment of crisis.

This spring, a column in the Laconia Daily Sun made the case for treating the 2032 vote as more than a formality. Writing in April, Eric Herr argued that New Hampshire’s founders deliberately built room for each generation to grapple with constitutional questions in the ordinary course of government, and that the years before 2032 should be spent in real public debate about what works and what doesn’t. He proposed borrowing the method the framers used in 1787, when they argued their case in newspaper essays later collected as the Federalist Papers, and running that kind of open argument through the press today. I think he is right, and I would push the idea one step further.

New Hampshire’s willingness to ask is not only procedural. The state’s Bill of Rights, Part First, contains an article almost no one cites: the Right of Revolution. Article 10 says that when government is turned to private interest, public liberty is endangered, and every other remedy has failed, the people may reform the old government or establish a new one. It is the boldest sentence in the document, and it has sat in the state’s founding law since 1784. New Hampshire does not treat the question of replacing its government as taboo. It treats it as a reserved right of the people.

What the federal constitution does not have

The U.S. Constitution makes change deliberately hard. Article V requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress to propose an amendment and three-quarters of the states to ratify it. In two hundred thirty-seven years the country has cleared that bar twenty-seven times, and the first ten of those arrived as a single package in 1791. The most recent amendment, which limits congressional pay raises, was proposed in 1789 and not ratified until 1992, a wait of more than two centuries.

Some of the machinery has simply frozen in place. The House of Representatives has been fixed at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, so as the population has grown the average district has swollen past 760,000 people. Rules set in one era keep running long after the conditions that produced them are gone.

This is the problem Thomas Jefferson saw coming. In a 1789 letter to James Madison, written from Paris while the new Constitution was still fresh, Jefferson argued that no generation has the right to bind the next. He worked out from mortality tables that a generation turns over about every nineteen years, and concluded that a constitution should expire on that schedule, forcing each new generation to consent to the rules it lives under or write its own.

In his own hand. Page one, dated “Paris September 6. 1789.” Jefferson underlined the principle himself. Image: Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, public domain.

Madison talked him down. Replying the following year, Madison warned that a constitution expiring every nineteen years would strip government of the stability that age and habit provide, and would throw the country into a destabilizing fight at every deadline. He won the argument, and the Constitution we have reflects his caution rather than Jefferson’s clock. The cost of that choice is the one Jefferson named: a country can end up governed by rules its living citizens never chose and cannot realistically change.

So I wrote one

I decided to test the idea by doing the work. Over the past several weeks I drafted a complete proposed constitution for the United States, twelve articles, built on Jefferson’s principle but designed to answer Madison’s objection. Then I wrote an annotated companion: a set of drafter’s notes that states the problem with the current system, defends each major change, and names the strongest argument against it. The goal was never to crown my version. The goal was to find out what gets exposed the moment you take the question seriously.

A few of the choices show what I mean. Instead of letting the document expire, as Jefferson wanted, the draft requires a national convention every nineteen years while keeping the existing constitution in force until the people revise or reaffirm it. The generation gets its scheduled say. The republic never goes dark between drafts, which is the collapse Madison feared.

The draft elects the president by national popular vote, decided by ranked choice. The current system has installed a president who lost the popular count twice this century, in 2000 and again in 2016. The draft caps the distortion in the Senate, where Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents and California’s more than 39 million hold the same two seats, handing a Wyoming voter more than sixty times the per-person weight. The same gap between who pays and who decides drives New Hampshire’s own school-funding fight, where I have already made the case for reform.

Same two seats. Residents per Senate seat, from U.S. Census estimates. Graphic: GSR.

The draft writes a plain majority requirement for ordinary legislation into the text, ending the filibuster’s standing supermajority. And it puts a single eighteen-year term on Supreme Court justices, staggered so every president gets two appointments and no one seat freezes a generation’s politics in place for decades.

And it does something this newsroom has reason to care about. It makes open government a constitutional command rather than a revocable statute. New Hampshire already points the way. Part First, Article 8 of the state constitution puts the public’s right to know in the Bill of Rights and declares that access to government proceedings and records shall not be unreasonably restricted. At the federal level that guarantee lives only in ordinary law, which bends to power every time the stakes climb. The draft moves it into the supreme text, where a bad week for transparency cannot quietly repeal it. That principle is the whole reason this outlet exists, and why it keeps testing how New Hampshire institutions behave when someone asks them to show their work.

The hardest part to defend is a short list of things the draft places beyond any amendment at all: free elections, equal rights, judicial independence, and the renewal principle itself. That eternity clause sits in direct tension with Jefferson’s whole premise. If each generation is sovereign, who am I to hand the next one a list it cannot touch? My answer, argued out in the companion, is that entrenching democracy is not the same as entrenching my preferences. It protects the next generation’s power to decide, including their power to disagree with everything else I wrote. I do not pretend the contradiction dissolves. I put it on the page and made the case anyway, because the alternative is to hide the seams and hope no one looks.

The point is not my draft

I have no illusion that my twelve articles are the right twelve, or that anything resembling them is getting ratified in my lifetime. That was never the wager. The wager is that the exercise itself is worth doing, and that a country which refuses to do it has quietly conceded something about itself.

New Hampshire reads its convention question every ten years and usually votes no. That is not a failure of the system. The asking is the system. It keeps the document accountable to the people currently living under it, and it keeps alive the idea that the rules are a choice rather than an inheritance. The federal government has no such clock, no Article 10, no moment built into the calendar when the country is made to look at its own foundation and decide whether it still consents.

A people that will not let itself ask whether the rules still fit has already answered the question. The answer is that the dead may keep governing the living, indefinitely, because no one alive is willing to reopen the file. New Hampshire, to its credit, reopens it on schedule. In 2032 the state will put the oldest question in its founding law to its voters again. The rest of the country should be brave enough to ask it too, even if, like New Hampshire usually does, it looks hard at the answer and decides to keep what it has.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary or authoritative sources before publication; see the fact-check table. The proposed national constitution and its annotated companion are the author’s own drafts, written as a thought experiment and clearly not current law; that involvement is disclosed at the top of the piece, and the full draft is offered as a free PDF. The one row marked ATTRIBUTED reflects an opinion column, cited for what its author argued rather than as established fact. The audio edition is a machine-read narration of this article produced by GSR. Charts and the ballot graphic are GSR originals built from the sourced figures; the State House photograph is used under CC BY 4.0 with credit, and the Jefferson manuscript image is a public-domain Library of Congress scan. This analysis rests on documentary and published sources and has not yet been tested against a live, on-the-record New Hampshire constitutional-law source. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.