Article V also provides for an alternative process, which has never been utilized. If requested by two-thirds of the state legislatures, Congress shall call a constitutional convention for proposing amendments. To become part of the Constitution, any amendment proposed by that convention must be ratified by three-fourths of the states through a vote of either the state legislature or a state convention convened for that purpose.
The mode of ratification is determined by Congress, and in neither of these two processes is a vote by the electorate applicable to the ratification of a constitutional amendment. Article V makes no mention of a time limit for the ratification of a constitutional amendment, and no amendment before the 20th century had a time limit attached to it.
The first amendment with a time limit was the 18th Amendment Prohibition , proposed in For political reasons, Congress included an arbitrarily chosen seven-year deadline in Section 3. The amendment was also the first to include a time delay before it would take effect, in that case one year after the date of ratification. The next two proposed amendments, the 19th Amendment Woman Suffrage and the never-ratified Child Labor Amendment, had no time limit attached.
However, beginning with the 20th Amendment, Congress has attached a time limit to the ratification of all proposed amendments. Some of these deadlines were in the language of the amendment itself, thus ratified by the states and not able to be changed. However, some of these deadlines, including the time limit for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, were in the proposing clause of the amendment, not in the language ratified by the state legislatures.
The three-state strategy for ERA ratification was developed following the ratification of the "Madison Amendment" as the 27th Amendment to the Constitution after a ratification period of years. Given that acceptance, some ERA advocates contended that the ERA's ratification period of just over two decades would surely meet the "reasonable" and "sufficiently contemporaneous" standards required by Supreme Court decisions in and Time limits were not attached to proposed amendments until , and Congress demonstrated its belief that it may alter a time limit in a proposing clause by extending the original ERA deadline.
Thus, supporters argued, the 35 existing ratifications should still be legally viable, and Congress likely has the power to adjust or repeal the previous time limit on the ERA, determine whether state ratifications subsequent to are valid, and recognize the ERA as part of the Constitution after three more states ratify. This mode of ratification is getting closer to potential realization. With the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment by the state of Nevada in and by the state of Illinois in , one more state is needed to ratify the ERA to achieve the initial 38 states for federal ratification as determined in If one more state ratifies the ERA, the ratification process will move into the courts for determination regarding the constitutionality of the original deadline that was applied to the Equal Rights Amendment.
As the legal article explains, Article V of the U. Constitution have brought forth questions about the process for doing so. Article V of the United States Constitution outlines basic procedures for constitutional amendment. To date, Congress has submitted 33 amendment proposals to the states, 27 of which were ratified.
The 27 th Amendment, which prevents members of Congress from granting themselves pay raises during a current session, was ratified in — years after it was first submitted to the states. The following steps must be completed for an amendment proposed by Congress to be added to the United States Constitution. Step 1. Passage by Congress. Proposed amendment language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses. Step 2. Notification of the states.
The national archivist sends notification and materials to the governor of each state. Step 3. Ratification by three-fourths of the states. Ratification of the amendment language adopted by Congress is an up-or-down vote in each legislative chamber. A state legislature cannot change the language. The second is that amendments matter a lot less than most people think.
Amendments change the text of the Constitution, but—the key point—very important changes happen even when the text of the Constitution stays the same. The Constitution, in practice, definitely changes, but amendments are not the main way that those changes happen.
These two things—how hard it is to amend the Constitution, and how so many changes happen without amendments—are opposite sides of the same coin. Because it is so hard to change the text, we have figured out other ways to make the kind of changes that you might expect to get from amending the text. A nation, like other living things, has to adapt if it is to survive. If one means of adaptation is closed off, it has to find another way.
That is what the U. Specifically, these four things are, I think, true: 1 There have been important changes in the basic nature of our government that took place without any change in the written Constitution.
For a long time after the nation was founded, the federal government did not do a lot. State governments were much more important. Today, federal law affects every aspect of our lives. But you cannot trace that change to any constitutional amendment. Some people will say that, all along, the Constitution gave the federal government the potential to play that important role; the federal government just chose not to.
Other people might say that the federal government should not be so powerful. There are many examples of this, but here is one that a lot of people overlook. The Seventeenth Amendment provided that Senators are elected by popular vote. Many people say that the Seventeenth Amendment made an important change in our system, because it took power away from state governments.
Having Senators elected by the people, instead of by state legislators, may have been a big change. But the Seventeenth Amendment did not have much to do with it.
Before the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted, most states had already cleverly figured out ways to make sure that the people—not state legislators—elected Senators.
All of that happened before the Constitution was amended. You can compare this change to a change in the way we elect the President. Formally, the President is elected by electors, not by the voters directly. Originally, the idea was that electors would be people with good judgment who would make up their own minds about who should be President. Now, for practical purposes, the electors vote automatically for the candidate who won the vote in their state.
No constitutional amendment authorized this major change. Congress approved the amendment, but not enough states did, so it never became part of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court interpreted other parts of the Constitution to prevent sex discrimination, and today it is hard to identify any way in which the law would be different if the ERA had been formally added to the Constitution.
The Fifteenth Amendment supposedly guaranteed that people could not be kept from voting because of their race. It was added to the Constitution in But well into the middle of the twentieth century, African-Americans in many parts of the United States were kept from voting by illegal means. If you just picked up a copy of the Constitution and read it, you would be completely misled about this disgraceful history.
The Fourteenth Amendment , adopted in , had a similar fate. It was intended to prevent many forms of discrimination against minorities. But its promise was not realized until almost a century later, during the civil rights era. A case can be made that the earliest constitutional amendments did matter.
That would include the Bill of Rights, for example, and the Twelfth Amendment , which fixed a problem in the way the President and Vice President were originally chosen. And several amendments have been useful housekeeping measures, like the Twenty-Fifth Amendment , which says what happens if the President is disabled. But if you really want to understand how the United States Constitution changes—in practice, not just on paper—constitutional amendments are a small part of the story.
The real action—in many ways, our real Constitution—is elsewhere, in the way the courts, Congress, the President, and the people in their daily lives have brought us the Constitution we have today.
The amendment process, however, has been criticized for having two defects. One is that it is too strict and therefore makes it too difficult to enact amendments. The other is that it is biased in favor of the federal government and therefore does not allow amendments that would limit the national government.
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