That the United States’ Constitution’s official procedures for amendment-by-convention are poorly designed, have not and will not be used, isn’t much of a failure. The system’s biggest purpose there in Article V is to retroactively legitimate the original Constitutional Convention (and by extension the rest of the Constitution itself), which exceeded the charge given to it by the Articles of Confederation system.

I say “will not” confidently, this is how things go and when it comes time for this system to cede to the next it won’t go according to this one’s rules and timetable but the next’s.

That’s something to have on the mind as we watch the Republicans press the limits* even of “constitutional hardball” and start to contemplate extraconstitutional hardball**. I maintain that the government shutdowns increasingly common since the 1990s represent an attempt by a Republican party strong in Congress to bootstrap a vote of no confidence into existence and assert parliamentary supremacy over a Democratic party strong in the White House.

Because both our civil wars have been secessions, we forget that civil wars can break out along other lines than regional - Mother Parliament’s claims on and then supremacy over the monarch were established in civil wars, and as Linz’s classic “Perils of Presidentialism” reminds us, legislative/executive wars on the same lines are quite common in systems like ours, which was after all an amateurs’ attempt to build a republic from of a blueprint of constitutional monarchy and a book of Plato.

* Though they’ve not yet exhausted the possibilities - jurisdiction stripping or getting weird with Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, or Section 4 of the 25th.

** In fairness, many well-established features of the American system like judicial review or “contempt of Congress” are extraconstitutional and were basically bluffed into existence.