The Key to the Cage: Is It Time for an Article V Convention?
Release Date: 06/13/2026
The Power of War
America at 250: Due Diligence
Who decides when the United States goes to war? The Constitution divides that responsibility between Congress and the president. Congress possesses the power to declare and fund war, while the president serves as commander in chief. But from the earliest years of the republic, the boundary between those powers has been tested, stretched, and frequently blurred. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Bill Bernardoni and Steve Herman trace the evolution of American war powers from Thomas Jefferson’s campaign against the Barbary powers to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
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One Toke Over the Line: Prohibition, Marijuana, and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
Alcohol prohibition required the Constitution twice—once to impose it and once to repeal it. Marijuana prohibition took a different path, imposed through federal law even as a growing number of states have chosen legalization. In this episode of America at 250: Due Diligence, Steve Herman and Bill Bernardoni examine how national prohibition takes hold, what happens when Americans refuse to comply, and how conflicts between federal and state power can reshape the law. Historian Richard Hamm explains how nearly a century of temperance organizing, religious activism, women’s groups, and...
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Power Struggle: Energy, Climate, and the Future
America at 250: Due Diligence
In April 1977, Jimmy Carter told the country that solving its energy crisis would take sacrifice — that the alternative might be, in his words, a national catastrophe. Nearly fifty years later, the crisis looks different. The gas lines are gone. In their place: climate change, an aging power grid, and data centers that are starting to draw more electricity than entire cities. But the underlying argument hasn't moved an inch. Who decides what America builds? Who pays for it? And who has the authority to make that call — Washington, the states, or nobody at all? The Constitution says almost...
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The First Shot: 27 Words, 230 Years, and a Fight That Isn't Over
America at 250: Due Diligence
Twenty-seven words. That is the entire text of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And for more than two centuries, Americans have been arguing about what those twenty-seven words mean — in courtrooms, in statehouses, in campaign ads, and in the streets. The fight is about guns. But it is also about something larger: liberty and public safety, individual rights and democratic government, what the Constitution meant in 1791 and...
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The State of Control: Federalism and the Limits of Federal Power
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the oldest unsettled arguments in American life—not whether to have a national government, but how much of one. Where should power actually live: close to the people, in the states and towns where most Americans spend their lives, or at the center, in Washington? The argument was there before the ink was dry. Inside the Constitutional Convention of 1787, James Madison pushed for what became known as the “federal negative”—a congressional veto over state laws—and lost. The states were too...
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The Key to the Cage: Is It Time for an Article V Convention?
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the most consequential — and least understood — provisions in the U.S. Constitution: Article V, and the question of whether the country should call its first-ever Article V convention. This episode opens in the summer of 1787, inside a sweltering Pennsylvania Statehouse, where George Mason — one of the sharpest minds at the Constitutional Convention — warned that the founders were “building a cage without a key.” Mason’s insistence on a state-led convention process became Article V’s...
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Kicking the Can Down the Road: What Does Government Owe Its People?
America at 250: Due Diligence
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence takes on one of the country’s biggest and most enduring questions: What does the government owe the people it serves? Not as a theory. Not as a campaign slogan. But in real life — in retirement checks, health care, food assistance, taxes, debt, and the promises made to working Americans. This episode traces the American social safety net from the Founding era through the New Deal, the Great Society, the Reagan Revolution, and today’s debate over Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, federal spending, and the...
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America at 250: Due Diligence Trailer
America at 250: Due Diligence
The United States turns 250 this year — but what does the anniversary actually mean? Hosted by nationally syndicated radio host Bill Bernardoni and former Voice of America White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman, America at 250: Due Diligence cuts through the noise to ask the hard questions: What has the Constitution's promise delivered over 250 years, and where has it fallen short? Each episode brings together historians, former lawmakers, policy experts, and advocates to examine the debates that have defined — and divided — American democracy from the beginning. This is the podcast for...
info_outlineAs America approaches its 250th anniversary, America at 250: Due Diligence turns to one of the most consequential — and least understood — provisions in the U.S. Constitution: Article V, and the question of whether the country should call its first-ever Article V convention.
This episode opens in the summer of 1787, inside a sweltering Pennsylvania Statehouse, where George Mason — one of the sharpest minds at the Constitutional Convention — warned that the founders were “building a cage without a key.” Mason’s insistence on a state-led convention process became Article V’s second amendment pathway, a mechanism that has never once been used in 250 years of American history.
Today, that mechanism is at the center of a growing political movement. The Convention of States Project has organized more than 20 states behind a push to convene a convention aimed at imposing fiscal restraints, term limits, and jurisdictional limits on the federal government. Supporters call it the founders’ intended check on a federal government that won’t check itself. Critics warn it’s a legal “pig in a poke” — a process with no rules for who attends, what they can do, or how it could be stopped once started.
To unpack the history, the strategy, and the stakes, the episode brings together three very different voices: a constitutional law scholar who has spent years studying Article 5’s uncertainties, the leader of the nationwide campaign to trigger a convention, and a former U.S. senator whose book lays out why he believes the effort poses a serious danger to the Constitution as we know it.
Together, they wrestle with a question that traces straight back to George Mason’s “cage without a key”: is Article V’s convention clause a safety valve the founders wisely built in — or a loophole that’s never been tested because it’s too dangerous to use?
Hosts
Steve Herman
Steve Herman is a veteran journalist and former White House Bureau Chief for Voice of America. He brings decades of reporting experience to America at 250: Due Diligence, helping guide the series through the historical, political, and institutional questions that have shaped the United States.
Website: Steve Herman
X: @newsguyUSA
Bill Bernardoni
Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing and co-host of America at 250: Due Diligence. His work focuses on building, producing, and distributing podcasts and radio programs that bring serious conversations to broad audiences.
Website: Bernardoni Media & Marketing
Blog: The Bernardoni Brief
Guests Featured in This Episode
David Super
David A. Super is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Economics at Georgetown University Law Center, where his research focuses on constitutional law, administrative law, and the federal budget. He has written and testified extensively on Article 5, including before state legislatures considering convention-related resolutions, and is a leading voice raising questions about the legal uncertainties surrounding a convention’s scope, delegate selection, and ratification process.
Faculty Page: David A. Super — Georgetown Law
Mark Meckler
Mark Meckler is the co-founder and president of Convention of States Action, part of Citizens for Self-Governance, and a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. He leads the nationwide campaign to call an Article V convention of states aimed at imposing fiscal restraints, term limits, and jurisdictional limits on the federal government — an effort that has secured resolutions from 20 states.
Website: Convention of States Project
X: @MarkMeckler
Russ Feingold
Russ Feingold is a former U.S. senator from Wisconsin, where he served nearly two decades and was the lone vote against the Patriot Act. He is the co-author, with Peter Prindiville, of The Constitution in Jeopardy: An Unprecedented Effort to Rewrite Our Fundamental Law and What We Can Do About It, which examines the risks of an Article 5 convention and the broader challenges of constitutional change in a polarized era.
Book: The Constitution in Jeopardy — Hachette Book Group
Listener Question
As America turns 250, do you think Article 5’s convention clause is a safeguard the founders got right, a loophole too dangerous to use, or something that needs to be reformed before anyone calls a convention?
Join the conversation and respond by sending us an email by visiting RadioFreeAmerica.media.