The US Constitution was amended to add Prohibition (18th Amendment). It was amended again to repeal it (21st Amendment). Two separate amendments. Why not just amend 18th Amendment to say “REPEALED” or strike it out, as with statutes?
Well, that’s exactly what the 21st amendment did:
So I guess I don’t really get the question.
The constitution can only be changed by amendment. If you wanted to alter the text of the 18th Amendment to read simply “REPEALED,” you’d need an new amendment that said simply "The text of the 18th Amendment shall be altered to read simply “REPEALED.”
With other laws, the actual published text of the statute is amended, such that whenever the next official copy of the laws are printed, the old provisions simply aren’t there.
The 18th amendment is still officially “in” the constitution, even though it’s provisions are now made ineffective.
Because people would forget what was so bad about the 18th Amendment that it needed to be repealed.
With statutes, if the legislature wants to change a statue to read “60 days” instead of “30 days” to do something, then the legislature simply goes into the existing statue and changes the “30” to “60” without creating a brand new statute.
When the legislature wants to repeal a statue, it simply repeals the language from the existing statute without creating a whole new statute.
For example, the statutes might say:
“Civil Code section 34. REPEALED”
instead of leaving Civil Code section 34 on the books and enacting an all new statute that says:
“Civil Code section 2,328,591. Civil Code section 34 is hereby repealed.”
Why not do this with the US Constitution?
Because the Constitution isn’t a code. The U.S. Code is exactly that: a codification of existing law into subject matter for ease of use. Congress does repeal existing statutes by creating whole new statutes, but the repealing statutes aren’t necessarily found in the Code. They are found in the U.S. Statutes at Large, which is a chronological non-codified listing of every statute passed by Congress in the order that they are passed. Here’s an example:
Source: “Chinese Exclusion repeal Act of 1943” (Chap 344, 17 Dec. 1943), 57 United States Statutes at Large, pp. 600-601.
It should be of interest to note that many nations, in amending their constitutions, do exactly what the OP refers to: Integrate modifications into the wording directly. I’ve always been under the impression that the practice of putting amendments at the end of the statute is a rather American practice which is pretty uncommon in the rest of the world.
U S A! U S A! U S A!
There’s really no answer to this except “We’ve always done it that way.” I vaguely recall reading, somewhere (everybody’s favorite cite!) that the issue was discussed when the First Congress began drafting the Bill of Rights and Madison just liked it better with the amendments at the end. The nature of the Bill of Rights may have played a role in this; they’re mostly supplementary provisions which can be tacked on at the end rather than replacements of existing text. Once the custom was established, it stuck.
The First Congress debated this issue when proposing the Bill of Rights. The argument against interlineation (striking out and inserting text) was that the original text was enacted by the people, while an amendment was essentially a legislative act, and that Congress and the state legislatures shouldn’t tamper with the text that the people enacted except through the separate process of amendment for which the popularly enacted text provides.
That same argument would apply to the Australian Constitution, since the original Constitution was enacted by the UK Parliament (after being passed by referenda in the Australian colonies), and amendments are enacted by the Australian Parliament together with a referendum of citizens in the Australian states. However, amendments are always enacted as deletions and/or additions to the original text, not as a supplement as they are in the US.
… but the 18th Amendment wasn’t “enacted by the people” as part of the original text of the Constitution. So the argument against interlineation would only apply to the first 10 Amendments, no?
… so if there were ever an amendment through the mechanism of Constitutional Convention, THEN THAT could be interlineated, because it’s no longer a work of the legislature?
Though there’s something to be said for enabling the following generations to clearly see that the thing was NOT perfect from the start, and even included at times some things that we now consider flat-out wrong or just stupid (3/5ths of a person; prohibition).
Nitpick: This is only ‘wrong’ or ‘stupid’ if you think the slave states should have had a huge representation in Congress disproportionate to the number of free citizens living in them.
Slavery was wrong and stupid, limiting the amount of clout slaveholding states held was not.
(Uh, carry on.)
At least one of the outdated sections of the Constitution is typically deleted. Look up a copy of the qualifications for President. We all know that one is a being natural-born citizen, but originally you could also qualify if you were a resident of the United States when the Constitution was adopted (so Alexander Hamilton could have been President).
As far as I know, the debate never recurred after the First Congress. Once the precedent was established, all subsequent amendments followed it.
The repeal of the 18th amendment by the 21st amendment is an interesting case, if the debate had been renewed. All the other amendments were ratified through state legislatures. The 21st amendment, however, was ratified by popular conventions, in much the same manner as the original text.
Do you have a online cite to a site doing this?
It has been my experience that copies of the Constitution are displayed intact. In the electronic world, such as The National Archives, you find, “[t]he following text is a transcription of the Constitution in its original form. Items that are hyperlinked have since been amended or superseded.”
The US Constitution Online site does something similar.
The standard practice I’ve seen is that obsolete or repealed parts of the Constitution are put in italics or parentheses.
I think that any self-respecting judge can figure out which parts are which.
My copy of the constitution clearly includes in the requirements for presidency:
Article II, Section 1, 5th paragraph.
The “grandfathering clause” has NOT been struck from the Constitution.
It probably is no longer included in the current statutes related to Presidential election because it’s moot.
(Derleth: IMO, from our AD2005 perspective, the proper thing to do would be to either count, or NOT count. You either are a legal person or you are not. Slaves NOT legal persons? Fine, you don’t get ANY extra representation based on them. But of course, the rub is that under the system at the time, tax obligation was also apportioned by population so not counting slaves at all would mean the slave economies would benefit from less taxes (which were low anyway). I guess you could say that what I find most wrong about the “we’ll solve THIS problem LATER” compromise was not its adoption in 1787 but that it was allowed to fester, quite likely in part because it was put in there by the Framers. But that’s too complicated for a facile throwaway parenthetical, man.)