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The U.S. constitutional amendment process. One of the main reasons for the 1787 Convention was that the Articles of Confederation required the unanimous consent of all 13 states for the national government to take action. This system had proved unworkable, and the newly written Constitution sought to address this problem.
Under Article Five, the process to alter the Constitution consists of proposing an amendment or amendments, and subsequent ratification. Amendments may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate ; or by a convention to propose amendments called by Congress at the request of two ...
A good example is the First Amendment - freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government. Under the Convention process, a convention could conceivably open up ...
This amendment would have heavily reduced America's ability to be involved in war, requiring a national referendum to confirm any declaration of war. Public support for the amendment was very robust through the 1930s, a period when isolationism was the prevailing mood in the United States. [17] [18] [19]
The amendment passed in the needed three-quarters of US state legislatures, but it took too long — decades instead of the seven years the amendment’s authors originally allowed.
Congress has also enacted statutes governing the constitutional amendment process. When a constitutional amendment is sent to the states for ratification, the Archivist of the United States is charged with responsibility for administering the ratification process under the provisions of 1 U.S.C. § 106b. [5]
It’s not easy to change the Constitution—and that’s exactly what the Framers intended. The post What Would It Take to Amend the Constitution? appeared first on Reader's Digest.
The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.