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Failed Amendments to the Constitution
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13485 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
3,356 Words |
| Author
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Morton Keller
Morton Keller is Spector Professor of History at Brandeis
University. |
One reason for the expenditure of so much time, money, and noise on the celebration of the Constitution's two hundredth birthday is that it is among the rarest of American phenomena: an authentic eighteenth-century artifact, only slightly altered from its original state. We don't have many such around. And when we add the stunning fact that this object of our celebration is the governing charter of what is arguably the world's most dynamic and changeable society, the current hoopla becomes not only understandable but well worthwhile.
Over the two centuries of its history, the Constitution has been amended only twenty-six times. (This compares with about five thousand amendments to our state constitutions.) Ten of those amendments - the Bill of Rights - were part of the political deal that made the Constitution's ratification possible, and so in effect belong to the original document. Amendments Eleven and Twelve dealt with technicalities of governance that rose in the first years of the American national government. That leaves a total of fourteen later alterations and additions: twelve, if we strike out prohibition and its repeal as a wash. Otherwise, the blueprint of American government is as it was drafted by the Philadelphia Fifty-five in the spring and summer of 1787.
The paucity of amendments is not the result of a lack of trying. About ten thousand (many of them repeats) have been proposed in Congress over the past two centuries. But only thirty-two made it over the first great amending hurdle: approval by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Of these, the large majority - twenty-six - successfully passed the second stage: ratification by legislatures or conventions in three-fourths of the states.
Six times in our history, constitutional amendments approved by Congress failed to gain the necessary consent of the states. A select category of failure indeed! What were they? Why did they fail? To answer these questions is to do more than add another tale to the current stock of constitutional storytelling. The pressures and sentiments that led to their passage in Congress, and then the very different pressures and sentiments that kept them from becoming part of the fundamental law of the land, remind us (and we constantly need this reminder) of how varied and complex American society is, and of necessity the system of government that serves it.
Machinery Of Government
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