The need for a federal Equal Rights Amendment remains as compelling as it was in , when now Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal : "With the Equal Rights Amendment, we may expect Congress and the state legislatures to undertake in earnest, systematically and pervasively, the law revision so long deferred.
And in the event of legislative default, the courts will have an unassailable basis for applying the bedrock principle: All men and all women are created equal. The traditional constitutional amendment process is described in Article V of the Constitution. Congress must pass a proposed amendment by a two-thirds majority vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and send it to the states for ratification by a vote of the state legislatures.
The amendment becomes part of the Constitution when it has been ratified by three-fourths currently 38 of the states. This process has been used for ratification of every amendment to the Constitution thus far. 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 In creating the amendment process for what would become the permanent U.
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. Over the generations, debate has continued over which powers fall into this latter category, and what limitations should be placed on the expanding powers of the federal government.
The first amendment to be ratified after the Bill of Rights, the 11th Amendment was also the first to be framed in direct response to a Supreme Court verdict.
In Chisholm v. Georgia , the Court had ruled that the plaintiff, a resident of South Carolina, had the right to sue Georgia for repayment of debts incurred during the Revolutionary War.
After many states argued that using the federal courts in this way would shift too much power to the national government, Congress passed the 11th Amendment, which removes all cases involving suits between states from federal court jurisdiction.
Passed in the wake of the chaotic presidential election of , in which Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Democratic-Republican Aaron Burr received the exact same number of votes in the Electoral College , the 12th Amendment provides the method for selecting president and vice president of the United States. Though Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution had mandated that each elector cast two votes without differentiating between their choices for president and vice president, the 12th Amendment requires electors to split the balloting for the two offices.
More than six decades passed between ratification of the 12th and 13th Amendments. With the United States roiled by sectional tensions over slavery, few in the post-founding generations wanted to provoke a constitutional crisis by proposing a potentially divisive amendment. But after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation , which freed only enslaved people behind enemy lines during the Civil War , support grew for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery.
Sandford by stating that anyone born in the United States is a citizen. The Congress shall assemble at least once in every year, and such meeting shall begin at noon on the 3d day of January, unless they shall by law appoint a different day.
If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.
The Congress may by law provide for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the House of Representatives may choose a President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them, and for the case of the death of any of the persons from whom the Senate may choose a Vice President whenever the right of choice shall have devolved upon them.
Sections 1 and 2 shall take effect on the 15th day of October following the ratification of this article.
Section 6. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission.
Ratified December 5, The eighteenth article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or Possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by conventions in the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
Ratified February 27, No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
Ratified March 29, The District constituting the seat of Government of the United States shall appoint in such manner as Congress may direct:. A number of electors of President and Vice President equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State, but in no event more than the least populous State; they shall be in addition to those appointed by the States, but they shall be considered, for the purposes of the election of President and Vice President, to be electors appointed by a State; and they shall meet in the District and perform such duties as provided by the twelfth article of amendment.
The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.
Ratified February 10, In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President. Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.
Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.
Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.
Ratified July 1, Note: Amendment 14, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 1 of the 26th amendment.
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