Intended to be Amended
The Constitution wasn't our first founding document, and has been amended 27 times. It can be changed again.
Time was running short. The nation hadn’t even found its footing yet and was already falling apart. The grand plan hadn’t materialized as they had hoped. It was time to act.
It would take weeks for the selected few to arrive. Madison saw this as both time not to be wasted and an opportunity. He spent those weeks writing up the Virginia plan for the new Constitution. Madison wanted his ideas at the forefront of the discussion.
The United States already had a founding document, the Articles of Confederation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working. States held all of the power, and the federal government had none. The federal government couldn’t raise funds, regulate trade, or conduct foreign policy without the states signing on with each individual decision, a near-impossible task. Even worse, the states were struggling to govern themselves. There were uprisings, tax issues, and no larger government to lend support where needed.
So, a group got together under the guise of improving the Articles of Confederation. However, both Madison and Hamilton intended from the beginning to toss out the Articles and make a brand new founding document.
There wasn’t time to write an entire ruleset with extreme precision and rigorous detail. America needed a solution fast. This is why, from the very beginning, the Constitution was viewed as a living document that would be amended over time to fix issues and grow as the country grew.
Madison’s plan of having a proposal ready for the start of the convention paid off. The first two months of the convention were spent discussing all of the aspects of the Virginia Plan.
Then came the New Jersey Plan and, finally, the Connecticut Compromise, which blended aspects of both the Virginia and New Jersey plans to form the Constitution we know today. The convention spent only 115 days planning, discussing, and writing a founding document to govern an entire young democratic republic.
Only 74 people were invited to the convention, and at the time, the US had a population of almost 3 million. Of those 74, only 55 showed up, and only 30 stayed the full time.
In the end, 39 signatures made it onto the Constitution. Several members left before the convention ended, and others who stayed refused to sign because they disagreed with the final document.
Rhode Island had boycotted the convention altogether because they felt it was a play to take power away from the states and give it to the federal government, which it was. Rhode Island also refused to adopt the Constitution until the Bill of Rights was created. Amendments that ensured a certain level of freedom for both states and citizens.
The road to getting the original states to ratify the Constitution was difficult. People were weary of it for numerous reasons. Some of the resistance was how much power was going to the federal government. Another aspect was that the document was flawed.
This is why they got to work on the Bill of Rights so quickly. The country also adopted the motto of “Vote now, amend later”. It was a message that succinctly stated it was understood that the Constitution was flawed, but it was a living document that could continue to be adjusted over time, and the fact that the country was in a dire, precarious position that necessitated adopting a new set of rules without delay to get the nation back on solid footing.
If there is ever any doubt about how malleable the Constitution is, the Bill of Rights was introduced during the first Congress in 1789, just one year after the original document was ratified. It was only one year old, and it already needed ten amendments.
The amendments didn’t stop there:
Amendment XI ratified 1795
Amendment XII ratified 1804
Amendment XIII ratified 1865
Amendment XIV ratified 1868
Amendment XV ratified 1870
Amendment XVI ratified 1913
Amendment XVII ratified 1913
Amendment XVIII ratified 1919 repealed by Amendment XXI
Amendment XIX ratified 1920
Amendment XX ratified 1933
Amendment XXI ratified 1933
Amendment XXII ratified 1951
Amendment XXIII ratified 1961
Amendment XXIV ratified 1964
Amendment XXV ratified 1967
Amendment XXVI ratified 1971
Amendment XXVII ratified 1992
Outside of the quirk of the 27th Amendment happening in 1992 (a footnote about this is at the end of the article; it was proposed back in 1789 with the Bill of Rights), America stopped amending the Constitution in the early 1970s. This was because of a fundamental shift in thinking happening in parts of America.
A new mindset referred to as “originalism” viewed the Constitution as needing to be upheld by its original form and intent. Despite 26 Amendments over 184 years, a new group wanted to view the Constitution as set in stone.
This thinking directly led to new interpretations of the Second Amendment by the courts, most notably the Supreme Court. Gun laws were stricter before originalism began distorting the meaning of the Second Amendment to create new loopholes—all in the name of letting people have powerful weapons never imagined by our founding fathers.
We now have a major section of the Republican party who view the Constitution as a holy text written by all-knowing, all-seeing demigods who could divine the perfect set of laws for hundreds of years of technological, economic, and social changes.
To suggest changing the document now is seen as blasphemous by this group. How could we possibly know what is better for modern America than people who died hundreds of years ago?
It is time for us to take back the Constitution, make it a document for the people once again, and propose amendments to make life better for all.
In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, when Americans weren’t happy with how our government was operating, the nation ratified four amendments to the Constitution in just one decade.
When people try to treat the Constitution as a perfect, untouchable document, remind them that:
It wasn’t America’s first founding document. It was our mulligan.
Only 39 people signed the Constitution. Most invited to participate didn’t believe in the process or the final document.
They worked on it for only 115 days.
It was written by great but flawed men with specific interests, not by deities.
Due to its flaws, it took a year to get enough states to accept the Constitution. Only the promise of amendments and America's dire situation led to its adoption as our rule set. North Carolina and Rhode Island had still not signed on.
The original authors of the Constitution also wrote up the Bill of Rights. Ten amendments were made to the Constitution only one year after America adopted the document.
It has been amended a total of 27 times so far.
It is a living document to change and adapt as the country grows and evolves.
Most importantly, the document, at its very core, declares a government by the people for the people. If the government or aspects of the constitution aren’t working for us, then it is time to use our right to change the rules.
The 27th Amendment is an interesting story as it was originally proposed by James Madison in 1789 as part of the amendments to the Bill of Rights.
In the 1980s, a college student, Gregory Watson, needed a topic for a term paper and found that six states had ratified this amendment and that no time limit was specified for how long an amendment process could take. His position in the paper was that this could become a modern amendment.
Watson got a C on the paper because his professor disagreed with his position. Retroactively, the school changed the grade to an A.
If you’re interested in more information about the Constitutional Convention, especially how they arrived at the Electoral College, I have a video on the topic:
