A Kentucky Republican who leads the state’s budgeting process joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to push lawmakers to call for a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution. It’s part of a years — if not decades — long push to force Congress to only pass balanced budgets.

“How much more can you go into debt before we have a major, major debt crisis?” DeSantis asked a panel of Kentucky lawmakers on Wednesday. “At some point, reality is going to bite, and I think the U.S. has been able to get away with this longer, just because we're the best bet in town.”

Noting that Kentucky is one of 49 states that require a balanced or debt-limited budget, GOP state Rep. Jason Petrie, who chairs the House Appropriations and Revenue committee, said it’s time to rein in federal spending using the mechanism provided to state legislatures.

Under Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution, if two-thirds of state legislatures call for a constitutional convention then it would trigger a process that has never played out before in American history. While DeSantis said there are sufficient guardrails to ensure outside interests don’t sway the convention from its intended goal of requiring a balanced budget.

The legislation proposed by Petrie would limit the convention to discussing an amendment to require balanced budgets. But Article 5 specifies the conventions “shall be valid to all intents and purposes.”

“We have never used Article 5, the state's convention, for a constitutional amendment for very good reason. It's not clear, and so I am not willing to put our entire country at risk over this,” said Democratic Rep. Anne Gay Donworth of Lexington. “I think the idea of having a balanced budget is wonderful. I think we should all aspire to that; however, that is Congress's duty.”

Should a convention or Congress propose a constitutional amendment, three-quarters of states would then have to ratify it under Article 5, either via state legislatures or special ratifying conventions.

Many lawmakers expressed fears over the monumental debt the federal government has amassed over the last several decades, under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The national debt currently stands at roughly $38.65 trillion. According to the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, President Donald Trump’s signature policy package, the One Big Beautiful Bill, will add almost $3.8 trillion in total to the deficit over the next decade, raising publicly-held debt from 100% of the GDP this year to 124% in 2034.

Petrie, from Elkton, said he believes that debt has or will soon become an “existential threat” to the country.

“Look, we don't live in isolation. So that's an existential threat in Kentucky. We would deal with it some way, and they would deal with it some way, but I would sure rather be on the front end and try to get some balanced budget requirement along,” Petrie said.

The measure was up for discussion only before the joint meeting of Senate and House committees. Petrie has filed or co-sponsored similar legislation three times before to “impose fiscal restraints on the federal government,” although not to the level of specificity in House Concurrent Resolution 45.

It calls for an amendment that would limit the total of federal expenditures approved by Congress to “the total of all estimated federal revenues for that fiscal year,” unless amidst a national emergency.

Trump has made frequent use of national emergency declarations to advance his trade and anti-immigration agendas. Democratic Rep. Matthew Lehman of Newport asked how emergencies would be defined and who would be the arbiter of deciding what is a balanced budget. The proponents said that’s the kind of questions that would be worked out during a convention, not in the resolution calling for one.

“If you read that page and a half, it's not going to answer all the questions that you're alluding to. That's what the convention is for,” Petrie said.

DeSantis has traveled to numerous states to reinvigorate the state-level campaign to call a constitutional convention, including Idaho and Montana. Proponents for the amendment, including the national Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, say that 28 states have called for a convention already.

“We've got a couple more that we think will happen relatively soon. Kentucky hopefully [will] be one of those,” DeSantis said. “The reason I'm here is because I don't think Congress is going to fix itself. I think the incentives up there are such that we're likely to continue more of the same.”

That number is contested by some groups. A policy paper out of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute throws doubt on that number, arguing that the existing 28 calls for some kind of balanced budget are too disparate to be lumped together and says the advocates pushing for an amendment should renew their efforts completely behind unified language.

Kentucky’s language would likely put it in line with resolutions passed in states like Florida, Ohio and Tennessee that allow the convention to also consider “any related and appropriate fiscal restraint” outside of a balanced budget alone.

GOP Rep. James Tipton of Taylorsville said a $38 trillion-plus debt is not sustainable and argued the federal government “can not continue down this path.”

“I truly believe the Founding Fathers in their ultimate wisdom understood there might come a time when Congress was not willing to do what was necessary, so they gave the power to the people,” Tipton said. “I truly believe we have a moral obligation to every citizen of the United States of America to address this issue.”