I am not American, so forgive me some ignorance, but it seems to me that whenever anything about the Constitution is mentioned, it is always about some Amendment or another, and rarely if ever about the original document.
Aren’t amendments changes?
What’s stopping there from being even more changes to it?
Why is it that changes to such a sacrosanct document are considered more important than what it used to say?
Yes, amendments are changes. In the case of the US Constitution, they are added at the end and separately numbered. That tradition started with the first 10 amendments, which are also called the Bill of Rights, which added many fundamental human rights to the constitution. Since then, amendments have just added words to the Constitution, not changed earlier ones or taken earlier words away, even in the case of the 21st Amendment, which basically repealed the 18th Amendment (the one that prohibited alcoholic drinks).
People talk about amendments rather than about the main part of the Constitution because most of the interesting stuff is in the amendments.
Yes, there could be more changes, and many are currently proposed, on subjects like abortion, gay marriage and burning flags. However, it’s hard for an amendment to be passed, because it has to be passed by 3/4 of the state legislatures as well as by the federal Congress.
The body of the Constitution is basically a treatise on “How To Organize A Government”. It sets down the basic structure of the federal government, denotes the functions of the separate branches, and delineates the relationships between the federal and state governments. The Amendments are considered not more important, but more directly relevant, to the citizenry. Some of them are just as procedural as the body of the document (Amendment XII (changing the way the President and Vice-President are elected), Amendment XVI (Federal Income Tax), Amendment XVII (Election of Senators changed), Amendments XX and XXII (Presidential Succession and Two-Term Limit)) but most of them are specifically delineated rights reserved to the people. The first 10 Amendments are called “The Bill of Rights”, but there are later ones that also list specific rights, like XIV, XIX and XXVI.
It’s not that the body of the Constitution is unimportant, but that it’s more in the nature of a manual of procedures, which isn’t good reading no matter who or what it’s about…
Yes. Specifically, the amendments to the U.S. Constitution are all additions
The process for amending the Constitution is complicated and requires several levels of supermajority votes. Furthermore, it is considered nearly impossible as a political matter to make changes that would affect the first 10 amendments in a substantive way.
The first 10 amendments constitute the Bill of Rights and they were passed en masse as part of the agreement that instituted the Constitution in the first place. So the Bill of Rights, while in the form of “amendments,” is really contemporaneous with the original document.
The “non-amendment” portions of the Constitution (the preamble and seven articles) address relatively technical matters that specify the structures, forms, and procedures with respect to the federal government. The Bill of Rights addresses what are considered fundamental rights of individuals and, thus, is of more interest and subject to more debate on a political level.
Even if ‘most of the interesting stuff’ is indeed in the amendments, it didn’t take much of a news search to find someone referring to ‘Article Six’ of the constitution, which is part of the original body of it, the section on Federal Power.
I’m not sure I’d agree with jayjay’s impression that the main body is more ‘abstract’ than the amendments, though I am not a constitutional scholar. (That’s the impression I get when he keeps saying that the main body is procedural.)
Another consideration is that the main body of the constitution was written in 1787, as far as I can tell, while the most recent amendment was passed in 1992, so it’s no surprise that some of them are more relevant to modern life. I also kind of get the impression that the main body constitution was written and adopted as quickly as possible, because the country needed something to organize how day-to-day business was being done, and some important details, like the bill of rights, were left for later negotiation
Ah. I didn’t realise that. That makes a difference to how I was perceiving it.
The Founding Fathers originally didn’t think it was necessary to include guarantees of rights in the Constitution, because “everybody knew” that the purpose of the Revolution and the new form of government was to secure and protect individual rights. It’s probably the single proudest boast of my adoptive state that we refused to ratify the Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added. The first ten Amendments were added en masse by the First Congress and rapidly ratified by the states, and constitute the Bill of Rights. Only 16 Amendments have been added since, plus the 200-years-belated ratification of an 11th provision in the original draft Bill of Rights as Amendment XXVII.
There are a few guarantees in the original Constitution, such as the prohibition of bills of attainder and ex post facto laws, and the full faith and credit requirement of Article IV that plays importantly into the gay marriage debate. There’s a provision in Article IV as well that guarantees each state a republican form of government. But most personal-rights guarantees derive from the amendments, notably I-VIII, XIII-XV, XIX, XXIV, and XXVI, of which the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth seem to be the most fertile sources.
For a very quick summary, there are seven articles in the original Constitution:
Article I creates a bicameral Congress, goes into a bit of detail on the establishment of the House of Representatives and the Senate and how their members are chosen, enumerates the powers that they have, lists a few powers expressly prohibited to Congress, and then a few more expressly prohibited to the states.
Article II establishes the Presidency, identifies what he’s supposed to do and how his top-level staff is to be named, and creates the impeachment process.
Article III creates the Supreme Court and the Federal judicial system (providing that there shall be lesser courts but leaving the details to Congress), specifies what is a “Federal question” arguable before the Federal courts, and defines treason.
Article IV provides for full faith and credit to be given by each state of the acts of other states, guarantees the priviliges and immunities of citizens, provides for extradition, for the admission of new states and for the governance of territory not yet admitted as a state, and (as noted in the previous post) guarantees a republican form of government in every state.
Article V is the amending process.
Article VI, in addition to minor provisions about assuming debts and requiring oaths to support the Constitution but prohibiting the requiring of religious tests, establishes the Constitution itself as the supreme law of the land, to which all other valid laws must conform.
Article VII is the self-actuating clause, providing that the Constitution becomes effective on ratification by nine states. Most Americans today don’t realize the radical nature of Articles VI and VII when they were adopted.
Nobody’s provided a link so far, so here’s one to many resources on the U.S. Constitution:
http://www.usconstitution.net/
Although as people have already pointed out, amending the Constitution is difficult, there have been amendments not that long ago and there doubtlessly will be amendments in the future.
Amendment 21 is a subtraction, specifically the subtraction of Amendment 18 (Prohibition).
I can see why you’d have that perception. The majority of consttutional controversies, and constitutional litigation, do tend to revolve around the amendments–specifically, the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
The reason is that these amendments, alone and in combination, place important restrictions on the power of states. And when a restriction appies to the states, it also applies to any organ created by a state government–for example, a county, city, or school district. There are thousands of such organs, so the potential for litigation multiplies exponentially.
The original constitution places a few restrictions on states–they can’t grant titles of nobility, for example, or erect trade barriers. These are relatively non-controversial and have led to only limited litigation. The Fourteenth Amendment places more serious, and more nebulous, restrictions on the states both directly, via the due process and equal protection clauses, and indirectly, via the doctrine of incorporation which has held that it applies most clauses within the Bill of Rights to the states.
So every time a state prosecutes a criminal, and every time a school district debates how to celebrate Christmas, you have the potential for First and Fifth (via the Fourteenth) Amendment lawsuits. To an outsider, it could easily give the mistaken impression that these are the only parts of the Constitution that matter.
But it’s in the form of an addition. None of the amendments actually deletes or alters previous text.
But Amendment 18 is still part of the text of the Constitution, and has not been deleted. It’s just no longer effective because of Amendment 21. Similarly, there are parts of the main body of the Constitution which are no longer effective because of amendments, e.g., parts of Article II, Section 2 (about the Electors of the President) have been effectively repealed by Amendment 12, but they are still writen in the text.
This is more than simply incorrect. It is the opposite of reality.
Take a look at the Constitutional text in the link Wendell Wagner gave. The single page text version is best for this.
Virtually every article has had text changed or superseded by amendments. In fact, most of the point of most of the amendments after the Bill of Rights has been to change text in the original articles, not merely to add words.
Note that all that changed text is still in the Constitution. That’s why the link referenced takes the trouble to note that the effect of certain parts have been superseded or modified or clarified by later amendments. And none of the amendments takes the form of: "Delete the following phrase following XXX in Article A, Section B, Clause C: ‘Jabber, jabber, jabber, jabber’; and replace with ‘yada, yada, yada.’ "
While the linked version is very useful in marking up amended parts of the original text, it’s not the usual presentation. For example, this FindLaw version does not mark up the effectively repealed or changed sections.
Everyone can now mark this post for when they need an example of “a distinction without a difference.”
But there is a difference. The Australian Constitution is modelled in many ways on the US Constitution, and has an amending process which is similar in difficulty to that in the US system. However, the amendments to the Australian Constitution are not listed at the end of the text: instead, they delete and add text within the main body of the Constitution, so that the deleted text is no longer part of the Constitution. For instance, there used to be a Section 127 in the Australian Constitution: it was deleted in 1967, and is no longer part of the text.
It may lead ultimately to the same result, but it’s a quite different way of handling amendments to a legal text.
No, it is important. Our habit of leaving the original text in place allows us to examine the history and evolution of our government. We can see what rights we’ve gained or lost over the years.
IOW, the pigs can’t simply rewrite the rules on the side of the barn and try to trick us into thinking that they’ve always been that way.