On September 15, 1787, as the Constitutional Convention drew to a close, James Madison noted that George Mason, a fellow delegate from Virginia and the principal author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, had a specific objection to the intended manner in which the Constitution would be amended. Specifically, Madison observed Mason:

Thought the plan of amending the Constitution exceptionable & dangerous. As the proposing of amendments is in both the modes to depend, in the first immediately, in the second, ultimately, on Congress, no amendments of the proper kind would ever be obtained by the people, if the Government should become oppressive, as he verily believed would be the case.[1]

Mason, in fact, had astutely recognized that under the proposed Constitution, not only were the people almost entirely dispossessed of their invaluable right to alter or abolish their systems of government, but, in a larger sense, he had also revealed a conspicuous structural antagonism and manifest contradiction between the Constitution’s ratifying authority and its amending power.

Curiously, the Framers, despite their urgent and repeated pleas on behalf of popular sovereignty and popular ratification, created a paradoxical constitutional system whereby the declaimed inferior authority of the legislature would definitively supersede the boasted supreme authority of the people. More specifically, with the two enumerated exceptions of Article V, every article, section, and paragraph of the Constitution, which had originally required the approval and ratification of the superior authority of the people, could thereafter be nullified, rescinded, replaced, and reversed by the lesser authority of the legislatures.