Constitution does not contain a provision requiring Congress to submit a proposed amendment upon request by some requisite number of states.
In addition to constitutional amendments proposed by Congress, states have the option of petitioning Congress to call a constitutional convention. Legislatures in two-thirds of states must agree, however. While the convention process has yet to be triggered, efforts to do so are not new. Interest in a U.
In the early s, direct election of senators was a hot topic. In the s and s, federal taxing power was the focus of many applications. Two issues came close to triggering conventions during the s to s—apportionment and a balanced federal budget. The current wave of interest began around Its focus is not a single issue nor is it being driven by one organization. Various groups are pushing their viewpoints—be they conservative, liberal, populist or progressive—and are urging action.
Wilkey, called a few years ago for a new convention. But Richard C. Leone, president of the New York-based Twentieth Century Fund, a nonpartisan research group, says recent efforts to amend the Constitution go too far.
His organization hopes to balance the argument by publishing The New Federalist Papers, taking the name from the original Federalist Papers which were written to promote ratification of the Constitution. Polsby, the Northwestern law professor, said the number of proposed amendments is not uncommon.
Find a Supreme Court Case on Findlaw. Focus on the Constitution: The Connecticut Compromise. Focus on the Constitution: Advice and Consent in the Senate. Interested in related materials? Take a look at these Virtual Reference Desk subjects for more information. 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. If the original meaning were consistently followed, both of the defects would be eliminated.
Some critics of originalism argue that the amendment process is too strict because it is difficult to secure approval by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Therefore, these critics contend the Supreme Court should engage in nonoriginalist judicial interpretation to allow for modern circumstances and values to be incorporated into the Constitution. The amendment process, however, is not too strict to allow for constitutional change.
It is true that the process does require amendments to be supported by a consensus. See John O. Rappaport, Originalism and the Good Constitution The problem is not that the constitutional amendment process requires a consensus but that the Supreme Court often intervenes before a consensus can emerge. A consensus often takes a long time to develop. As a result, no amendment will be enacted, since the Court has already made a change. By contrast, if the original meaning were followed, the amendment process would have the opportunity to enact changes in the Constitution that are supported by a consensus.
This analysis helps to explain why so much constitutional change has occurred in the last three generations through judicial interpretation rather than the amendment process.
For example, during the New Deal, the Roosevelt Administration did not attempt to pass constitutional amendments to give the federal government more regulatory power. Instead, it attempted to pack the Supreme Court. There seems little doubt that the nation would have supported an amendment that conferred additional regulatory powers, but there is a good chance that the consensus requirement would have meant the federal government would have received less power than the Court eventually granted it.
A second problem with the amendment system is that its current operation is biased in favor of the federal government. The Constitution provides two methods for proposing amendments. While all of the existing amendments have been enacted through the congressional proposal method, in which two-thirds of each House of Congress proposes an amendment, no amendment has ever passed through the convention method.
Under that method, two-thirds of the state legislatures can apply for Congress to call a convention that would then decide whether to propose an amendment. The convention method was an essential part of the original Constitution. The drafters of the Constitution recognized that the congressional proposal method was controlled by the federal government. Consequently, it could not be relied upon to reform federal governmental abuses. The drafters therefore placed the convention method into the Constitution, since this method largely bypasses the federal government.
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