When was the last time the Constitution was amended with the change focusing specifically on a part of the text that appears before the Bill of Rights and later amendments?
I’d say the 12th amendment which revised how we elect the president. It was enacted in 1804.
I’d say all of them except the 21st.
The most recent Amendment, the 27th, which was ratified on May 5, 1992. It says that any law changing the salaries of members of Congress doesn’t take effect until after the next election of members of the House of Representatives.
What part of the main body of the constitution did the Bill of Rights modify?
But Chronos’s answer points out that the Bill of Rights (i.e. the first 10 amendments) has never been amended, so by the OP’s question, most of the other amendments have been to the pre-Bill of Rights portions of the Constitution.
There is a basis to quibble a bit with Chronos’s answer, however. Although the 14th Amendment has not been formally amended, there were some voting rights cases where the Supreme Court rejected challenges to laws based on the 14th Amendment, but amendments have been passed to overturn those results. Technically, the text of the 14th wasn’t amended by those amendments, but the effect was. So those amendments were to the post-Bill of Rights portion of the Constitution.
The 22nd, enacted (is that the right word?) on February 27, 1951, limits the amount of time the POTUS can serve. That amends one of the Articles (not sure which, but you get my point).
Yeah…for some reason I went for the first time the main body was modified and not the most recent time.
My bad, carry on!
Mostly Article 1 (which lays out the powers of Congress), because the Bill of Rights puts limits on Congress.
ISTM most amendments to the US Constitution, rather than explicitly modify existing language do so implicitly, by either adding something that was left out before or decreeing that something will now on be done differently than before. Then of course you have the peculiar practice that when you print the US Constitution, you just tack on the amendments in order of adoption and though some part of the earlier text is rendered moot by the new amendment, it is still there to be read, so it doesn’t look “amended” so much as overrode.
Madison apparently thought that the amendments should be specifically inserted into the main text of the Constitution, but was over-ruled by congressional colleagues who thought that was too detailed. “Close enough for government work.”
Which is good. I had the opportunity to read a Canadian bill once, and it was basically "In P1 s3 (a) strike “shall not” and replace “shall only except when …” and that sort of crap for pages and pages. Basically rewriting a previous law by specifying inserts and deletes one phrase at a time. It was unreadable. You’d need a copy of the original and a pen to figure out the effect of the changes. Simply adding clauses as full sentences or paragraphs that override previous clauses makes so much more sense.
Good on the rest of congress for doing something sensible.
When was the next time congress did something sensible?
Besides, the constitution may be somewhat ambiguous but certainly short and concise is better than todays’ laws, where a bill may be thousands of pages - thus guaranteeing nobody important actually reads and analyzes it.
Most of the amendments (including the first ten) are additions to, not changes to the constitution. Even the 22nd just adds to the eligibility requirements. I think the 12th may be the right answer; it does change the method of how the electoral college works.
Never mind Canadian, half of what the US Congress passes reads like that. (back home our local constitution requires that for any amendment to itself or to a statute, its final passed version must contain the full text of the article or section as it ends up reading; no such requirement for US law)
The post-Civil War amendments were fundamental changes. They changed the US from a country where slavery was entrenched in the Constitution to a free country.
The 13th ended slavery.
The 14th enacted equal protection and applied the Bill
of Rights to the states.
The 15th guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race or prior servitude.
It took a while for the 14th and 15th to be fully implemented, but the US today would be a very different place if they hadn’t been passed.
In addition to creating equal protection, the 14th Amendment made the Bill of Rights a national constitutional Bill of Rights, not just a federal Bill of Rights. That was a major structural change.
The 17th was also a major structural change. It took the power to choose senators away from the state legislatures and gave it directly to the people.
The 25th Amendment (1967).
Original text of the constitution:
The 25th amendment replaced this.
Only 2 amendments since then, neither of which affect earlier text.
The 27th Amendment restricts a power granted to Congress in Article I, Section 6:
But it doesn’t change what was said before, it only adds to it.
Short and concise are not the same thing, and many of those thousand-page laws are more concise than the Constitution. The Constitution is so vague that it needs to be read, not in isolation, but in the context of centuries of case law, which is far less accessible than a single modern bill.
And then consider things like the Second Amendment. It’d be a lot clearer without the first clause, if that’s what the writers had intended. Or alternately, if they had intended for the right to only apply to members of well-regulated militias, they could have said that, in no more words than they actually did use. No matter what they intended, what they wrote wasn’t a good way to write it.