Welcome, my friend.
Let’s dive right in.
The second most common reaction I get when I tell people about No Confidence is skepticism, and quite reasonably so. (After all, if it amending the US Constitution were easy, we wouldn’t have the problems we have today; we would instead have completely different problems.) If you’ve been spreading the word yourself, you’ve probably had more than a couple of people scoff at how unlikely it is that we could amend the Constitution in the modern era.
They aren’t wrong to be skeptical. The Constitution currently has 27 amendments, and the last time we ratified one was in 1992. However, the last time we proposed and ratified an amendment was in 1971.
(Yes, that is a weird discrepancy. Yes, I’ll explain shortly.)
Before I can tell you what the skeptics are missing, though, you need to understand the scale of the task ahead of us, and why they’re entirely right to be skeptical.
The Problem
The United States Constitution is one of the oldest written constitutions in the world that remains in force today. It’s also among the least amended.
In the 237 years it’s been in force, the Constitution has been amended only 27 times. Meanwhile, over half the state constitutions are similarly old, having been in force since before the 20th century, and on average they have more than 150 amendments each. As historian Jill Lepore writes:
“[A]round the world, written constitutions turn out to have lasted, on average, only seventeen years before being scrapped. Not the U.S. Constitution. It’s lasted more than two hundred years and hasn’t been amended in any meaningful way since 1971, more than half a century ago.
“Laws govern people; constitutions govern governments. Lately, American democracy has begun to wobble, leaning on a constitution that’s grown brittle.”
(If the name Jill Lepore sounds familiar, it’s probably because her history of the Constitution, We The People, won her the Pulitzer this year.)
The last time the US Constitution was amended, cellphones didn’t exist. The word “text” was a noun, Nokia wouldn’t start making bricks for another decade, and the Internet wasn’t even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye. It’s not that the world hasn’t changed enough in the intervening time to warrant changing the rules that govern our government. So why haven’t we?
The United States Constitution is notoriously difficult to amend. It requires a two-thirds majority in either Congress or the States to propose an amendment, and ratification by a three-quarters majority of either the States or their citizens.
You already know the rest of the story.
The United States of the 21st century is divided down the middle, half-and-half. Every issue that someone might want an amendment on falls under the purview of either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, and thus about half the states and about half the Congresspeople will refuse to even consider proposing or ratifying it. The result is stark. From the last chapter in We The People:
“Members of Congress had proposed more than twenty-one hundred constitutional amendments between 1980 and 2020. Congress, more polarized with each passing year, approved none. In roughly that same stretch of time, state legislatures introduced almost five thousand amendments and passed nearly four thousand.”
The will of the people is clearly to amend our constitutions, but the US Constitution has such a high bar for ratification that we haven’t managed to do so ever since our nation became so starkly divided.
The Exception
So what about 1992? That was the year the 27th Amendment was ratified. Why doesn’t it count as “amending the Constitution in a meaningful way”?
The 27th Amendment, known as the Congressional Pay Amendment, is straightforward: it says that if Congress passes a law to give itself a pay increase, that raise can’t take effect until after the next election. In other words, the voters have a chance to make their displeasure known before Congress gets to see a dollar.
Pretty obvious, right? The reason it isn’t a “meaningful” change is that even though it was ratified in 1992, it was proposed in 1789.
No, that’s not a typo. The Congressional Pay Amendment was part of the original Bill of Rights proposed by the first Congress, it just didn’t get ratified at the same time as the ten most popular. That first Congress didn’t set a time limit for ratification, as all the more recent ones have, so it could be ratified even today, despite being two centuries old.
That was what Gregory Watson of the University of Texas wrote, at least in a sophomore paper for his poli sci course, back in 1982.
He got a C.
Determined to redeem himself, Watson began a one-man campaign to increase the number of ratifications of the amendment from seven, three short of the ten it would have required at our nation’s founding, to the 38 required by a 50-state US.
It took him ten years of writing, faxing, and calling state legislators around the country, but on May 5, 1992, when Alabama became the 38th state to ratify the Congressional Pay Amendment, making it the 27th Amendment to our Constitution, he proved himself right.
What Greg Watson understood was that politics is the stories we tell each other. It isn’t merely the laws we write or the cases we decide in court. Rather, politics is the outward expression of a nation’s desire to live in peace and stability.
It wasn’t just that three-quarters of the United States ratified the Congressional Pay Amendment.
It was that one single American citizen had spent ten years of his life and thousands of dollars of his own money because he believed in a simple truth: the rest of us don’t get to write our own paychecks, so Congress shouldn’t either.
Maine went first, ratifying it in 1983.
Colorado next, in ‘84.
Then, in 1985, five states ratified it. Not a single year passed between then and 1992 without at least one more state joining the list. As more and more states joined, the public began to take notice.
It wasn’t just a few local-interest stories anymore. By 1992, it was national news. This wasn’t just a piece of legislation; it was the triumphant conclusion of a decade-long campaign against a Congress that, even as of 1991, was still giving itself pay raises.
As for Watson: his professor later submitted a grade-change form, officially changing his grade to an A+. It’s the only one the University of Texas has issued—their usual scale only goes up to an A.
The Lesson
Politics is not a machine. You can’t simply drop 38 ratifications into the coin slot and expect an amendment to pop out.
Politics is the stories we tell one another.
The story of the 27th Amendment tells us what we need to know: if we follow the Constitution’s letter and the American public believes in what we’re doing, the Constitution will change.
A Story of Our Future
I’d like to tell you a story now, a story about a future that might not come to pass, but that isn’t so far outside the realm of credibility.
A week or so after you read this article, a news story breaks. The government is covering up the murders of more and more American citizens. You go on Facebook, and a friend of yours is freaking the fuck out. She thinks she’s gonna die, that they’re all after her, that it’s just a matter of time, that there’s no way out.
She’s lashing out at people in the comments, too. Your mutuals are trying to talk her down, but reasoning with her isn’t helping, and neither is comforting her. She just can’t be calmed, and you’re not about to try to get your face bitten off.
Then you remember what I wrote last time in “How You Can Help”. She is your friend, after all, so you decide it’s worth a try. You copy and paste the last example I gave directly into a reply:
“Yeah, it’s true, things are really awful right now. I’ve been listening to a podcast called Unf*cking The World, and it’s been giving me hope that we’ve got a way out of this.”
Around half an hour later, you get a notification that she liked your comment. You check back in to find she hasn’t replied to anyone else since you posted it. She still hasn’t responded to any offers of advice, help, or comfort, but at least she’s not snapping at anyone anymore. Progress.
The next day, you wake up to find she’s started posting links to UTW videos everywhere across all her socials. She’s finally turned off the caps lock, though, so it’s a definite improvement.
You go back to your day, but you do occasionally respond to things you see online when you happen to see them. Mostly it’s just copy-and-paste, but every once in a while you’ll write a new one and add it to the text file you’ve got sitting on your desktop.
It’s October when the news comes: the war is heating up, and the elections will have to be postponed, with the date TBD. Your social media is a flood of doom from every direction (except for your friend from earlier, but everyone is basically used to her posting UTW links these days, with varying levels of exclamation points).
You throw out a couple of your copy-and-paste comments to lift some spirits, but it’s not doing much against all the screaming. You make one grumpy post before logging out: “If y’all are really this upset, you could do something about it. UTW.vote, just saying.”
Your post gets way more likes than you’re used to, so you mute it. You do re-share it every time another big news story breaks, though, and it gets another couple hundred likes. That’s pretty neat.
November 3 rolls around. The US doesn’t hold elections; something else happens instead.
46 of the 50 states introduce nearly identical resolutions in their legislatures. The other four follow later in the week. These resolutions ask Congress to propose the No Confidence Amendment and pre-emptively ratify it.
After all, if an amendment can be ratified 200 years after its proposal, why not 2 months before? But just in case, the resolutions also commit to ratifying it again after Congress proposes it.
A couple of states quickly pass the resolution, and another couple just as quickly reject it. Elections are scheduled for December 1, with the military providing armed presence at each polling station to defend against external threats from our enemies, of course. ICE graciously offers to temporarily suspend all its other operations and provide joint support. Three more states pass the resolution. None reject it.
December 1 comes and goes. The vote results are nonsensical and absurd. Widespread election fraud is suspected, but nothing is ever proven. On December 3, both houses of Congress surprise the world by introducing a joint resolution to propose the No Confidence Amendment, exactly as written.
It’s a protest move, of course; no votes are scheduled, and few members of Congress are willing to comment on it. Nonetheless, it has an effect; five more states ratify No Confidence within the week, bringing the total to 10, with 3 now opposing.
It isn’t just national news anymore; it’s international. The world is holding its breath, as it did during the Brexit vote. Two more states ratify, and every news site now features a widget on its front page reading No Confidence: 12/38.
Your state isn’t one of them. Your friend reaches out to you. She’s so glad you introduced her to UTW back in October, because it gave her a purpose exactly when she needed one. She asks if you would be willing to call your state rep and state senator, and she gives you the phone numbers. It takes you about fifteen minutes.
Two days later, your state joins the list of supporters, bringing the total to 18. Two days after that, something unbelievable happens:
The Senate passes the No Confidence resolution, 99 in favor and 0 opposed.
One news article discusses the other times the Senate has recorded a 99-0 vote, including most recently in May 2026, when the Senate forfeited its pay during government shutdowns, and the one that accepted the ratification of the 27th Amendment in 1992.
Practically every day brings news of another state ratifying No Confidence or, rarely, rejecting it. The House continues to deliberate, but one Representative gives a statement to the press saying that if and when his state ratifies the No Confidence Amendment, he will support its proposal in the House, but not a moment before. Three days later, his state passes ratification.
A news organization conducts a poll of Americans and releases the results: 80% support No Confidence and 5% oppose. The House passes the resolution as the number of ratifying states crosses 30, officially proposing the amendment once the writing is clearly on the wall. It’s the final act of the outgoing Congress before the new one is seated.
So far, ten states have rejected the No Confidence Amendment, but 35 have ratified it.
The President posts on social media that No Confidence is an illegal conspiracy and that he won’t comply with it, no matter what. The remaining five states ratify No Confidence the very next day, bringing the total to 40.
It won’t happen exactly like this, of course.
There’s an infinite number of possibilities for what Congress might decide to do, how the states might decide to respond, and what the current administration might do to antagonize the people, believing itself invulnerable. If it were easy, we would have done it already.
The founders of our country wrote Article V of our Constitution so that if our government ever became intolerable, we could change it without having to shed any more blood.
America goes through long stretches of history when we forget this power we were given, and we’ve been in this one for 55 years now. As Lepore puts it: “Article V is a sleeping giant. It sleeps until it wakes, and then it roars.”
55 years isn’t the longest the giant has slept. The 12th Amendment was ratified in 1804, and the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865, 61 years later.
The critical point is that there is one and only one ingredient required for this plan: overwhelming public support. No Confidence can’t be stopped by elections going the wrong way, or even by elections being suspended altogether. As long as we are willing to fight and our numbers continue to grow, we can keep pushing it forward.
Next Time
You know what the skeptics are missing now: it’s that no amendment we’ve proposed in the past several decades has been able to secure the support of more than half of the American people.
We didn’t get to the UTW numbers today, or why they give me so much hope; I’ll have to leave that for next week.
Thank you for sticking with me, my friend. Keep spreading the good news, and stay safe.
Thank you for reading! This is just one possible version of our future, of course; if I told you about every variation I’ve considered over the past months, we’d be here for days.
Every version of No Confidence relies on the support of the people, and that means we need your help. Share this article, share the news about No Confidence. Share hope.
Questions, challenges, additions, and thoughtful disagreements are encouraged in the comments; bring your good faith, and others will do the same. Today’s topic: of every fictional event in my narrative above, what strikes you as the least likely?
Share this with someone you know who needs a purpose in their life, and stay safe.
–Danielle
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