How many changes are there to the constitution

Instead, his idea would add a few clarifying words to the Fourth Amendment in order to tackle the issue of online privacy. Despite voicing his support for constitutional additions, Rosen admits the process for doing so would be anything but speedy. So how do the opinions of these scholars measure up to those of future attorneys and the public? The younger generation appears to feel torn between respecting the pillar of the American legal system, and admitting that our modernity may be out of the scope of the founders' interpretations.

He added echoing Tribe, "The fact that it has kept its original core elements is a source of strength. The strength of the rule of the land is definite, but not all future legal experts believe strength and tradition are immune to a periodic update.

As most things on the Internet, this debate rages on in online forums. The liberties of U. This is especially true regarding First Amendment rights. One of the problems with the Articles of Confederation was the difficulty of changing it. To prevent this difficulty from recurring, the framers provided a method for amending the Constitution that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and in three-quarters of state legislatures to approve a change.

The possibility of amending the Constitution helped ensure its ratification, although many feared the powerful federal government it created would deprive them of their rights.

To allay their anxieties, the framers promised that a Bill of Rights safeguarding individual liberties would be added following ratification. These ten amendments were formally added to the document in and other amendments followed over the years.

Among the most important were those ending slavery, granting citizenship to African Americans, and giving the right to vote to Americans regardless of race, color, or sex. One of the chief areas of compromise at the Constitutional Convention was the issue of slavery.

Should delegates who opposed slavery have been willing to compromise? Why or why not? Appleby, Joyce. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Massachusetts: Belknap Press. Beeman, Richard. New York: Random House. Cook, Don. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Drinker Bowen, Catherine. Boston: Little, Brown.

Ellis, Joseph. New York: Knopf. Knollenberg, Bernard. Growth of the American Revolution: — New York: Free Press. Lipsky, Seth. New York: Basic Books. Locke, John. A Letter Concerning Toleration. Translated by William Popple. Two Treatises of Government. Voters in each state would elect members of these conventions. If Congress fails to respond to an issue important to the states, the states can also elect delegates to a constitutional convention that can propose amendments for the states to ratify.

That procedure has not been used since the original Constitutional Convention in The Articles of Confederation had required a unanimous vote of the states to approve any changes, which kept the Confederation Congress from fixing any of the weaknesses in the Articles. The amendment process set high hurdles to clear, but still allowed the government to address new problems and adopt changes in the federal system peacefully, once a broad national consensus on the issue was achieved.

The Constitution rests on the sovereign power of the people, who have the right to change aspects of their government when necessary. The first ten amendments satisfied complaints that the Constitution lacked specific guarantees of individual rights. After that, amendments were added individually to meet problems as they arose.

The first added after the Bill of Rights was triggered by a lawsuit, filed by attorney Alexander Chisholm, who as executor of an estate for a South Carolina merchant, Robert Farquhar, sued the state of Georgia to secure payment for war supplies the state had purchased from Farquhar.

The Supreme Court ruled in Chisholm v. Georgia that states could be sued. Georgia paid the claim but called on its congressional delegation to support an amendment shielding the states from suits brought by citizens of another state or foreign country in federal court. Congress responded with what became the Eleventh Amendment, which the grateful states swiftly ratified. From then on, such claims could be filed only in state courts. The unexpected outcome of the election of prompted the Twelfth Amendment.

Although they defeated their Federalist rivals, Jefferson and Burr received an equal number of votes in the Electoral College. Because neither man had gotten a majority, the outcome of the election was left to the House of Representatives, which the opposition party controlled. Federalists who hated Jefferson voted for Burr for President.

The House voted thirty-six times before it chose Jefferson for President, after the Federalist Party leader Alexander Hamilton threw his support to Jefferson, as the more able and honorable candidate. Jefferson became President and Burr became Vice President.

Burr later shot and killed Hamilton in a duel. To prevent such a situation from happening again, the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in , provided that the Electors vote separately for Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. More than sixty years passed before another amendment was added to the Constitution. Starting with the case of Marbury v.

Madison , the Supreme Court justices claimed the right to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. Also, state supreme courts had asserted the power of judicial review over state laws, establishing precedents for the national Supreme Court.

Later, in McCulloch v. Madison vetoed an internal improvements bill based on this belief but called for a constitutional amendment to allow for it. No new amendments were adopted until after the Civil War. In , the election of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, triggered the secession of the Southern states.

Five years later the Civil War led to an amendment that did the just opposite. The Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery throughout the United States. President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in , but that order affected only the states in rebellion and did not end slavery in the states that remained in the Union.

The abolition of slavery was the first of three amendments resulting from the Civil War that shifted more power from the states to the federal government.

Sandford The amendment tried to ensure that the freedmen would have rights equal to those of all other citizens. In order to be readmitted to the Union and end Reconstruction rule, the Southern states were required to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in , prohibited denying someone the right to vote because of race. It was the first of several amendments that broadened the franchise—the right to vote.

This post—Civil War amendment was intended to give the newly freed African Americans sufficient political power to protect their constitutional rights. It protected only men at the time, as no states then permitted women to vote.

However, the Southern states soon undermined this amendment with a series of tactics, such as poll taxes and literacy requirements, that effectively disenfranchised their black citizens for another century. After Reconstruction, there were no new amendments until the Progressive era early in the twentieth century, when reformers sought to improve the workings of the federal government, and to reform American society.

Two amendments were ratified in The first permitted the government to collect income taxes. The tax, which was not challenged at the time, expired in Later, in the s, reformers proposed a tax on individual and corporate income as an alternative to raising tariffs to produce revenue. The federal government received most of its operating expenses from duties imposed on imported goods, but high tariffs increased the cost of consumer goods.

Constitution, the framers made constitutional reform easier—but not too easy. According to Article V of the Constitution, an amendment must either be proposed by Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate , or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of state legislatures.

Either way, a proposed amendment only becomes part of the Constitution when ratified by legislatures or conventions in three-fourths of the states 38 of 50 states. Since the Constitution was ratified in , hundreds of thousands of bills have been introduced attempting to amend it. But only 27 amendments to the U. Constitution have been ratified , out of 33 passed by Congress and sent to the states. Under Article V, states also have the option of petitioning Congress to call a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures agree to do so.

This has never occurred, though state legislatures have passed hundreds of resolutions over the years calling for a constitutional convention over issues ranging from a balanced budget to campaign finance reform.

In order to secure support for the Constitution among Anti- Federalists , who feared it gave too much power to the national government at the expense of individual states, James Madison agreed to draft a Bill of Rights during the first session of Congress. Of these first 10 amendments, the First Amendment is arguably the most famous and most important. It states that Congress can pass no law that encroaches on an American freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble and freedom to petition the government.

These fundamental rights of thought and expression go to the heart of the revolutionary idea of popular government, as envisioned in the Declaration of Independence. Differing interpretations of the amendment have fueled a long-running debate over the original intention of the Second Amendment.

The crux of the debate is whether the amendment protects the right of private individuals to keep and bear arms, or whether it instead protects a collective right that should be exercised only through formal militia units.

Gun rights supporters, as well as Supreme Court decisions such as District of Columbia v. Heller , have argued the Second Amendment protects the right of an individual person to keep and bear arms for the purposes of self defense.

British soldiers quartered in an American colonial home s. The Supreme Court has never decided a case on the basis of the Third Amendment, but it has referred to its protections in cases surrounding issues of property and privacy rights. Most notably, British authorities made use of general warrants, which were court orders that allowed government officials to conduct searches basically without limitations.

Beginning in the 20th century, with the growth in power of federal, state and local law enforcement, the Fourth Amendment became an increasingly common presence in legal cases, limiting the power of the police to seize and search people, their homes and their property and ensuring that evidence gathered improperly could be excluded from trials.

It also requires the federal government to pay just compensation for any private property it takes for public use. The Sixth Amendment also deals with protecting the rights of people against possible violations by the criminal justice system. It ensures the right to a public trial by an impartial jury without a significant delay and gives defendants the right to hear the charges against them, call and cross-examine witnesses and retain a lawyer to defend them in court.

According to the modern interpretation of the amendment—shaped by Supreme Court cases such as Powell v. Alabama , which involved the defendants known as the Scottsboro Boys —the state is required to provide effective legal representation for any defendant who cannot afford to employ a lawyer on their own.

With the Seventh Amendment, Madison addressed two Anti-Federalist concerns: that the document failed to require jury trials for civil non-criminal cases, and that it gave the Supreme Court the power to overturn the factual findings of juries in lower courts.

Considered one of the most straightforward amendments in the Bill or Rights, the Seventh Amendment extends the right to a jury trial to federal civil cases such as automobile accidents, property disputes, breach of contract, and discrimination lawsuits. It also prevents federal judges from overturning jury verdicts based on questions of fact, rather than law. Unlike nearly every other right in the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court has not extended the right to civil jury trial to the states, although most states do guarantee this right.

The Eighth Amendment continues the theme of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments by targeting potential abuses on the part of the criminal justice system. During the debate that produced the Bill of Rights, skeptics argued that by listing such fundamental rights in the Constitution, the framers would be implying that the rights they did not list did not exist.

Madison sought to allay these fears with the Ninth Amendment. It ensures that even while certain rights are enumerated in the Constitution, people still retain other non-enumerated rights. Legal scholars and courts have long debated the meaning of the Ninth Amendment, particularly whether or not it provides a foundation for such rights as privacy as in the case Griswold v. As the final amendment in the Bill of Rights , the 10th Amendment originally aimed to reassure Anti-Federalists by further defining the balance of power between the national government and those of the individual states.