US constitition and amendments

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Identify and explain how the constitution may be informally amended.

The US constitution is a written, codified document and has survived for over 200 years. This has been possible because it has changed and adapted to take into account developments in US society. The ‘Founding Fathers’ laid down two formal procedures for proposing amendments to the constitution. The first requires Congress to call a national convention at the request of two-thirds of the states –along the same lines as the original convention in Philadelphia. This procedure has never been used. The second method requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress. Once proposed an amendment needs to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. This can be done either through a vote in the state legislatures, or by special state ratifying conventions. The latter has only been used once, for the 21st amendment in 1933.

Although over 10,000 amendments have been suggested only 40 have been approved by Congress and only 27 have been approved by states. The difficulty in formally amending the Constitution can be illustrated by the problems encountered by the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980’s. Having passed both Houses of Congress successfully, its ratification journey was halted in 1982 after 35 states had given their approval. Thus, it fell just three states short of enactment. The amendment procedure was deliberately made difficult by the Founding Fathers in an effort to preserve political stability. Despite this, however, over the years a number of procedures for informally amending the Constitution have evolved.  

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The first informal procedure involves the Constitution being kept up to date by judicial interpretation. The Supreme Court has the power to interpret the constitution and, in doing so, has been prepared to ignore precedent and overturn previous judgements. A famous example of such is case is Roe and Wade which affirmed the right of women to seek abortion during the first three months of pregnancy. This indicates the power of the Courts to interpret the constitution for modern society. The fact that in the 90’s, when conservative morality swept across American, the Supreme Court devolved states the power ...

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