This blog is part of a series celebrating Constitution Week (September 17 through 23). It's brought to you by Jon M., Career Support Librarian in the Community Engagement Office.
One of the defining characteristics of the US Constitution is that it is still mostly the same after 234 years, and that’s largely a result of how difficult it is to change it.
Amendments to the Constitution require two-thirds of the House AND the Senate OR require two-thirds of the States to request a convention to change the Constitution. And in each of those cases, ratification requires three-fourths of the State legislatures or State conventions assembled for that purpose. It doesn’t take a long look at political news from any State or the nation’s capital to see why far more Constitutional Amendments are proposed than actually ratified.
But proposing Constitutional Amendments remains popular. Many politicians have offered easy Constitutional solutions to complex problems over the years. And few have managed to gather the popular will needed to make their ideas become another Amendment. Following the Bill of Rights, only seventeen Amendments have overcome all the hurdles to become part of the Constitution. And one of those was to overrule a previous Amendment, in the case of the Eighteenth and Twenty-first Amendments.
The proposed changes usually relate to our nation’s most divisive issues: abortion, guns, religion, and budgets. Usually these seek to clarify issues upon which the Constitution’s wording is called vague or where the proposing figure claims the interpretation in either the courts or general society is wrong somehow.
In the case of abortion, there have been proposals for many years calling for 5th and 14th Amendment rights to apply to all conceived human fertilized eggs until birth. There have also been proposals to allow abortion and make reproductive choices be an enumerated right.
For many, the Second Amendment and guns are either a target or conceived as one. There have been proposals to modify or even repeal that Amendment, and also to clarify it to absolutely positively extend to the right of individuals.
Religious rights are another common focus of those proposing Amendments. Some want to clarify a right to school prayer. Or to allow religious believers to be exempt from commercial regulations such as discrimination laws in regards to hiring, service, health insurance benefits, and various tax matters. Proposals to define marriage have also been made.
Another target for Amendments has been the budget. Many proposals call for a balanced-budget to be required, though few politicians ever boldly publish their ideal model of such a budget. Other ideas would require greater majorities to raise tax rates or would abolish income taxes by repealing the Sixteenth Amendment.
Other issues which bring about proposals to change or amend the Constitution often relate to The Electoral College, including allowing limits to campaign funding, putting term limits on judges, making burning the US Flag a crime, and many others. Some come close to being ratified, others do not. And while many of the newer proposed Amendments have only a few years to get ratified, some did not. For instance, the Twenty-Seventh Amendment was proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1992. Some things take their time. Others got through Congress and the States in less than a year.
Some of these ideas that have not become Amendments include one that would strip a US citizen of their citizenship if they took a noble title or accepted a gift from a foreign power (though twelve States did approve of this and it can still be ratified). Another, would make making slavery illegal be illegal has been passed by two States, though that second one was in 1862. Twenty-eight States have passed a Child Labor Amendment first proposed in 1926. The Equal Rights Amendment’s ability to become an Amendment ended in 1982. And there was a DC Statehood proposal that failed in 1985.
It takes a lot of popular will to get an Amendment ratified. It would also take a lot of popular will to call up another Constitutional Convention, but there have also been drives to do just that. Though this method has never been used to gather and then propose new Amendments to the Constitution, the idea has passed in nineteen of the thirty-four States needed to do so. Will that happen? And will three-fourths of the States then ratify whatever they propose? No one can say for certain, but history seems to have its thumb on the side of the scale that says “Unlikely.”
The United States Constitution and its Amendments is the law of this land. And its principles have been argued about, many of its ideals have been challenged, its freedoms have been expanded to include many who have previously been disallowed those rights, and its people have generally prospered in the way the Preamble called for it to do. For 234 years and counting, it has secured the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. And it may last centuries more if we can keep it.
Additional reading:
The Constitution in Jeopardy: How to Read the Constitution and Why
How to Read the Constitution and Why
The Heritage Guide to the Constitution
