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Thirty-three amendments to the Constitution of the United States have been proposed by the United States Congress and sent to the states for ratification since the Constitution was put into operation on March 4, 1789. Twenty-seven of those, having been ratified by the requisite number of states, are part of the Constitution.
Some of the more important powers reserved to the states by the Constitution are: the power, by "application of two-thirds of the legislatures of the several states," to require Congress to convene a constitutional convention for the purpose of proposing amendments to or revising the terms of the Constitution (see Article V). [57]
Articles Three through Twelve were ratified as additions to the Constitution December 15, 1791, and are collectively known as the Bill of Rights. [72] Article Two became part of the Constitution May 7, 1992 as the Twenty-seventh Amendment. [73] Article One is technically still pending before the states. [38] November 16 •
No part of the Constitution expressly authorizes judicial review, but the Framers did contemplate the idea, and precedent has since established that the courts could exercise judicial review over the actions of Congress or the executive branch. Two conflicting federal laws are under "pendent" jurisdiction if one presents a strict constitutional ...
The United States Constitution and its amendments comprise hundreds of clauses which outline the functioning of the United States Federal Government, the political relationship between the states and the national government, and affect how the United States federal court system interprets the law. When a particular clause becomes an important ...
In ratification conventions, the anti-slavery delegates sometimes began as anti-ratification votes. Still, the Constitution "as written" was an improvement over the Articles from an abolitionist point of view. The Constitution provided for abolition of the slave trade but the Articles did not. The outcome could be determined gradually over time ...
Although the Constitution gives Congress an important role in national defense, including the exclusive power to declare war, to raise and maintain the armed forces, and to make rules for the military, [14] some critics charge that the executive branch has usurped Congress's Constitutionally-defined task of declaring war. [15]
A major issue early in the 20th century was whether the whole Constitution applied to the territories called insular areas by Congress. In a series of opinions by the Supreme Court of the United States, referred to as the Insular Cases, the Court ruled that the territories belonged to, but were not part of the United States. Therefore, under ...