I don’t understand the difference between passing US Laws vs. making an Amendment to the US Constitution. The latter implies it is an adjustment to the metes and bounds of the text…or related matters. Shouldn’t issues outside these boundaries simply be US Laws, if they are to be at all?
In regard to marriage, or flag burning, or (previously) driving 55mph as a nation, for example…as opposed to who has the right to vote or teens drafted without being able to vote…where and how do our lawmakers draw the line? Is it defined, or is guidance granted somewhere?
Maybe some wise SDopers can explain the difference(s)?
Congress may make laws under the power that the Constitution grants. But those powers, and those laws, may never conflict with the Constitution.
For example, Congress may pass, and the president may sign, a law banning criticism of the President’s policies.
But the courts are likely to quickly strike down that law, because it conflicts with the Constitution.
If, on the other hand, Congress passed and the states ratified an amendment to the Constitution that gave Congress the power specifically to criminalize criticism of the President, then the Constitution would no longer forbid such a law, and it could be passed and enforced.
In short: a mere law can be overturned by the courts if it conflicts with the Constitution. Changing the Constitution itself admits appeal to no higher authority.
And amending the Constitution is pretty damn hard.
Also, they have to put the Amendment before the various State Legislatures, & get the approval of a strong majority of those legislatures.
Maybe it’s the fever I’m currently running, but I belive it must also be put to a popular vote, & then pass through Congress again, before a Presidential signature passes it into law.
I think that you need either a strong majority of the state legislatures or voter referendums in a strong majority of the states, but not both. I think that Congress gets to choose which of these methods will apply. This is after 2/3 of both the House and Senate approve it.
Also, IIRC, the president does not have to sign the ammendment, and he does not get to veto it.
As the base law for the United States, the Constitution has several properties that separate it from normal legislative acts.
For one thing, while a legislative act can be repealed by a simple vote of a later Congress (or even the same Congress if they realize how badly they’ve screwed up), a Constitutional Amendment requires that either 2/3 of both the House and the Senate approve it and that 3/4 of all the states then approve it (either by legislative vote or by conventions) or that a convention is called by the legislatures of 2/3 of the states and that the proposals emanating from that convention is then approved by 3/4 of the states.
The extra effort to get a supermajority of both houses of Congress and an even larger percentage of state representatves (either legislative or conventual) to approve the change makes such a change a serious effort that can rarely be the result of swaying (e.g., buying off) a few key legislators. as occasionally happens with riders to bills that mysteriously appear in conference committees reconciling bills between the House and the Senate.
For another, the Constitution, as the Supreme Law of the land is used to judge other laws, so that a Congress that passed a law annointing some popular individual “president for life” would be in violation of the Constitution that stipulates that (except in extraordinary circumstances) the Congress has no vote in the election of the president and that (as amended) the Constitution prohibits any individual from serving as president for more than ten years.
It is purely a judgement call as to which laws should require supermajorities to pass and should have the power to abrogate any other laws passed by legislation. So far, we have done a relatively good job of limiting changes to the Constitution to serious matters. A change to the definitions for eligibility for the presidency would seem to be a legitimate process to keep away from the whims of ephemeral Congresses. On the other hand, proposed amendments to make specific actions (such as burning flags) unlawful, while they are hot issues for some people, have not gotten the support of the overwhelming majority of citizens required to make them the Law of the land.
(This is one of the issues behind some opposition to proposals for amendments to make flag burning illegal or define marriage as a heterosexual activity. Even a number of people who are vehemently opposed to showing disresepct for the flag or to recognizing homosexual marriages are still reluctant to make such issues a permanent part of the Constitution.)
I recognize how hard it is to amend the US Constitution, of course. I guess I developed a slightly wrong impression, however, about the context of an amendment. This clarifies for me the history of repeal of Prohibition, and why it is addressed in the Amendments to US Constitution at all.
Perhaps, as a safeguard against going too far right or too far left, it is a good thing that Amendments are so hard to pass.
Yep. Prohibition had to be repealed in the Constitution because it had been enshrined in the Constitution. (It is the only law written into the Constitution, (so far), to deny persons’ rights rather than to set governmental procedures or to limit or control government’s ability to curtail rights.)
(The actual laws with penalties to govern prohibition were simple Congressional statues, but the XVIII Amendment was needed to permit those statutes to be written.)
Well, if you put it that way, the 19th Amendment denies people the right to prevent women from voting, the 20th Amendment denies people the right to serve more than two terms as president and the 26th Amendment denies people the right to prevent someone 18 or older from voting.
Since no one’s posted it yet, here’s the actual text from the US Constitution that describes the amendment process:
I feel it’s worth noting that in more than 215 years, there have been only 28 amendments to the US Constitution, and ten of those were passed as a group, and two others cancel each other out.
The last one took just under 200 years to ratify.
So Constitutional amendments are not a matter to be taken lightly. They take a huge amount of work and commitment to get done, and in general are only used to address very serious matters.
