"All Amendments to this Constitution shall be ratified by vote of the majority of Senators elected by the separate states."
I wonder if you could get 3/4 of the states to approve that? Because if you did, then it would be so much easier to come back and get 51 senators to trash the whole doucment the following year.
And oh the way, after they trash the document with 74 new Amendments, they will pass a 75th Amendment: "All Amendments to this Constitution shall be ratified by voting among 3/4 of the states."
You asked — “I wonder if you could get 3/4 of the states to approve that? Because if you did, then it would be so much easier to come back and get 51 senators to trash the whole doucment the following year.”
No, I don’t see 3/4 of the states approving that, because they’ve had such a time approving other amendments by 3/4 of the states. It’s not easy to get that done, unless something is overwhelmingly demanded by our population. This sort of thing wouldn’t be overwhelmingly demanded, for sure.
Besides that — you have to remember that if it gets to 34 states — that *each of these 34 states* will have specifically worded their request for a Constitutional Convention in terms of a balanced budget amendment. That’s something that the populations of each of these states *demanded* for it to be put forth in this context of a Constitutional Convention.
In other words, if these states had not *limited* the scope of the amendment, they would have never gotten it passed in those states. That pretty much means that you would have about 34 states that would *immediately* oppose expanding this to any other amendment — just by the fact of how they worded their requests in the first place. It would be hard to get the remaining states to override those 34 states.
And then..., of course it *still* has to be ratified (whatever amendment or amendments come out of it) by 3/4 of the states...