By transferring time limits from the text of an amendment to the proposing clause, Congress retained for itself the authority to review the time limit and to amend its own previous legislative action regarding it. In , Congress clearly demonstrated its belief that it may alter a time limit in the proposing clause when it passed a bill moving the deadline from March 22, , to June 30, A challenge to the constitutionality of the extension was dismissed by the Supreme Court as moot after the deadline expired, and no lower-court precedent stands regarding that point.
The Coleman decision asserted that Congress may determine whether the states have ratified in a "reasonable" time or whether the amendment is "no longer responsive to the conception which inspired it. Therefore, under the principles of Dillon and Coleman , and based on the fact that Congress voted to extend the ERA time limit and to accept the year-long ratification period of the Madison Amendment as sufficiently "contemporaneous," it is likely that Congress has the power to legislatively adjust or remove the time limit constraint on the ERA if it chooses, to determine whether or not state ratifications which occur after the expiration of a time limit in a proposing clause are valid, and to promulgate the ERA after the 38th state ratifies.
The legality of these recissions is questionable. All precedents concerning state rescissions of ratifications indicate that such actions are not valid and that the constitutional amendment process as described in Article V allows only for ratification. For example, the official tally of ratifying states for the 14th Amendment in by both the Secretary of State and Congress included New Jersey and Ohio, states which had passed resolutions to rescind their ratifications.
Also included in the tally were North Carolina and South Carolina, states which had originally rejected and later ratified the amendment. In the course of promulgating the 14th Amendment, therefore, Congress determined that both attempted withdrawals of ratifications and previous rejections prior to ratification had no legal validity. Therefore, it is most likely that the actions of the five states that voted to rescind their ratification of the ERA between and are a legal nullity.
Cart 0. Two Modes of Ratification. By State. In Congress. The Constitution, in practice, definitely changes, but amendments are not the main way that those changes happen.
These two things—how hard it is to amend the Constitution, and how so many changes happen without amendments—are opposite sides of the same coin. Because it is so hard to change the text, we have figured out other ways to make the kind of changes that you might expect to get from amending the text. A nation, like other living things, has to adapt if it is to survive.
If one means of adaptation is closed off, it has to find another way. That is what the U. Specifically, these four things are, I think, true: 1 There have been important changes in the basic nature of our government that took place without any change in the written Constitution. For a long time after the nation was founded, the federal government did not do a lot.
State governments were much more important. Today, federal law affects every aspect of our lives. But you cannot trace that change to any constitutional amendment. Some people will say that, all along, the Constitution gave the federal government the potential to play that important role; the federal government just chose not to.
Other people might say that the federal government should not be so powerful. There are many examples of this, but here is one that a lot of people overlook.
The Seventeenth Amendment provided that Senators are elected by popular vote. Many people say that the Seventeenth Amendment made an important change in our system, because it took power away from state governments.
Having Senators elected by the people, instead of by state legislators, may have been a big change. But the Seventeenth Amendment did not have much to do with it. Before the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted, most states had already cleverly figured out ways to make sure that the people—not state legislators—elected Senators.
All of that happened before the Constitution was amended. You can compare this change to a change in the way we elect the President. Formally, the President is elected by electors, not by the voters directly. Originally, the idea was that electors would be people with good judgment who would make up their own minds about who should be President.
Now, for practical purposes, the electors vote automatically for the candidate who won the vote in their state. No constitutional amendment authorized this major change. Congress approved the amendment, but not enough states did, so it never became part of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court interpreted other parts of the Constitution to prevent sex discrimination, and today it is hard to identify any way in which the law would be different if the ERA had been formally added to the Constitution.
The Fifteenth Amendment supposedly guaranteed that people could not be kept from voting because of their race. It was added to the Constitution in But well into the middle of the twentieth century, African-Americans in many parts of the United States were kept from voting by illegal means.
If you just picked up a copy of the Constitution and read it, you would be completely misled about this disgraceful history. The Fourteenth Amendment , adopted in , had a similar fate.
It was intended to prevent many forms of discrimination against minorities. Passage by Congress. Proposed amendment language must be approved by a two-thirds vote of both houses. Step 2. Notification of the states. The national archivist sends notification and materials to the governor of each state. Step 3. Ratification by three-fourths of the states.
Ratification of the amendment language adopted by Congress is an up-or-down vote in each legislative chamber. A state legislature cannot change the language.
If it does, its ratification is invalid. Step 4. After Congress proposes an amendment, the Archivist of the United States, who heads the National Archives and Records Administration NARA , is charged with responsibility for administering the ratification process under the provisions of 1 U.
The Archivist has delegated many of the ministerial duties associated with this function to the Director of the Federal Register. Neither Article V of the Constitution nor section b describe the ratification process in detail. The Archivist and the Director of the Federal Register follow procedures and customs established by the Secretary of State, who performed these duties until , and the Administrator of General Services, who served in this capacity until NARA assumed responsibility as an independent agency in The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the 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 the State legislatures.
None of the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed by constitutional convention.
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