I’ve noticed that in a lot of the recent elections that amendments of various kinds have come up on all sides on whether you should or shouldn’t vote for a person. And While I have read the constitution before, I never really mesmerized the amendments. Therefore I have decided to go through each one and write a post on each one, hopefully completing this series before the November Election.
This is primarily a place for me to write my thoughts on the amendment and put in what I learned. Feel free to comment, but remember to be polite especially to anyone else who comments. Politics can get under people’s skins pretty fast, especially when one has a differing opinion.
There are 27 amendments, although 33 have been proposed. In order to be official, it must be ratified by a majority of the states after going through a congressional vote and being sent to the states to sign.
That means that 6 amendments were never signed by enough states. 4 are still considered pending, and 2 were approved by Congress but failed to ratified in a specified time given.
One has been “pending” since 1789, which wanted to regulate the size of representational districts. In 1810, an amendment was proposed to strip citizenship of any citizen who accepts a title of nobility from another country. In 1861 an amendment was proposed to make slavery impervious to abolition. Three states actually said yes to this amendment, although two later retracted their vote. In 1924, an amendment was put to the states to give the federal government to regulate and enforce child labor laws.
The two who failed were more recent, happening in the 1970s-80s. The Equal Rights Amendment which would be a more formal way of outlawing discrimination by gender. Also the amendment that would allow the District of Columbia to be seen as a state of its own, giving it representation in congress , the electoral congress, and any constitutional situation.
Some amendments took relatively little time to ratify. Others, like the 27th amendment, take surprisingly long time. The 27th was proposed in 1789 and was only ratified in 1992. It was the longest ratification process. The shortest was the 12th amendment which took 6 months, and was a revision on presidential election processes. The average appears to be 2-3 years.
I actually looked up some of the amendment proposals that didn’t make it to congressional approval. Some were easy to understand why it didn’t make it. Others seemed like common sense additions, but that’s another topic for another day.
Essays:
| One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six |
| Seven and Eight | Nine and Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen |
| Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen | Twenty |
| Twenty One | Twenty-Two | Twenty-Three | Twenty-Four |
| Twenty-Five | Twenty-Six | Twenty-Seven | Unratifieds |
Sokorra Lewis 
2 thoughts on “The Amendments: An Intro”