Despite all the agita over Ron DeSantis, an intriguing, and possibly revelatory, article about the governor flew mostly under the radar last month. According to the Tampa Bay Times, a little-known Idaho political group had run a radio ad featuring DeSantis declaring his support for invoking Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which allows for amendments to America’s foundational legal document, to impose term limits on Congress. “Florida’s legislature was the first state in the nation to pass a resolution calling for an Article V term limits convention,” DeSantis says in an undated audio recording that was also uploaded to the U.S. Term Limits website, one of the groups backing the movement. “I’m so encouraged to hear that Idaho is working on the same term limits resolution.”
Tinkering with the Constitution has, of course, been a conservative fantasy for centuries, albeit without much traction. But, these days, the political will has been accumulating within parts of the right to prompt Congress to call an honest-to-god constitutional convention via an arcane and untested provision of Article V. Shrewdly, DeSantis doesn’t go beyond proposing term limits, but even this position has allowed fringe conservatives to dream of a day when they can use their control of state legislatures to fix all sorts of perceived federalist ills: the tax code, the expansion of the Commerce Clause, and so forth.
DeSantis, a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law, isn’t any sort of threat to return us to a world of taxation without representation, but he’s an expert MAGA dog-whistler. And just as Trump found ways to speak in the love language of the Proud Boys, in 2016, without fully engaging the group, DeSantis clearly recognizes that bandying about the term allows him to wink at Tea Party federalists, fringe conservative academics and grassroots insurrectionists, alike, without getting dirt on his starched white shirts. (Representatives for DeSantis did not comment when I asked if he still supports an Article V convention.)