How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change

How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change PDF Author: Roger C. Hartley
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826503969
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Since the Constitution's ratification, members of Congress, following Article V, have proposed approximately twelve thousand amendments, and states have filed several hundred petitions with Congress for the convening of a constitutional convention. Only twenty-seven amendments have been approved in 225 years. Why do members of Congress continue to introduce amendments at a pace of almost two hundred a year? This book is a demonstration of how social reformers and politicians have used the amendment process to achieve favorable political results even as their proposed amendments have failed to be adopted. For example, the ERA "failed" in the sense that it was never ratified, but the mobilization to ratify the ERA helped build the feminist movement (and also sparked a countermobilization). Similarly, the Supreme Court's ban on compulsory school prayer led to a barrage of proposed amendments to reverse the Court. They failed to achieve the requisite two-thirds support from Congress, but nevertheless had an impact on the political landscape. The definition of the relationship between Congress and the President in the conduct of foreign policy can also be traced directly to failed efforts to amend the Constitution during the Cold War. Roger Hartley examines familiar examples like the ERA, balanced budget amendment proposals, and pro-life attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade, but also takes the reader on a three-century tour of lesser-known amendments. He explains how often the mere threat of calling a constitutional convention (at which anything could happen) effected political change.

How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change

How Failed Attempts to Amend the Constitution Mobilize Political Change PDF Author: Roger C. Hartley
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826503969
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Since the Constitution's ratification, members of Congress, following Article V, have proposed approximately twelve thousand amendments, and states have filed several hundred petitions with Congress for the convening of a constitutional convention. Only twenty-seven amendments have been approved in 225 years. Why do members of Congress continue to introduce amendments at a pace of almost two hundred a year? This book is a demonstration of how social reformers and politicians have used the amendment process to achieve favorable political results even as their proposed amendments have failed to be adopted. For example, the ERA "failed" in the sense that it was never ratified, but the mobilization to ratify the ERA helped build the feminist movement (and also sparked a countermobilization). Similarly, the Supreme Court's ban on compulsory school prayer led to a barrage of proposed amendments to reverse the Court. They failed to achieve the requisite two-thirds support from Congress, but nevertheless had an impact on the political landscape. The definition of the relationship between Congress and the President in the conduct of foreign policy can also be traced directly to failed efforts to amend the Constitution during the Cold War. Roger Hartley examines familiar examples like the ERA, balanced budget amendment proposals, and pro-life attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade, but also takes the reader on a three-century tour of lesser-known amendments. He explains how often the mere threat of calling a constitutional convention (at which anything could happen) effected political change.

Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments, and Amending Issues, 1789-2023 [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments, and Amending Issues, 1789-2023 [2 volumes] PDF Author: John R. Vile
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1440879532
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 767

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Book Description
Written by a leading scholar of the constitutional amending process, this two-volume encyclopedia, now in its fifth edition, is an indispensable resource for students, legal historians, and high school and college librarians. This authoritative reference resource provides a history and analysis of all 27 ratified amendments to the Constitution, as well as insights and information on thousands of other amendments that have been proposed but never ratified from America's birth until the present day. The set also includes a rich bibliography of informative books, articles, and other media related to constitutional amendments and the amending process.

Corporate Personhood

Corporate Personhood PDF Author: Susanna Kim Ripken
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108416527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Explores the nature of corporate personhood and how it affects the rights, powers, and influence of corporations in society.

Hidden Laws

Hidden Laws PDF Author: Robinson Woodward-Burns
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300258283
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
How state constitutional reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development State constitution reform guides and stabilizes American constitutional and political development. Using data sets and historical case studies, Robinson Woodward†‘Burns shows how the federal government has repeatedly deferred to state constitutional reform to manage or address difficult national constitutional controversies, including conflicts over the regulation of slavery, banking and taxation, women’s suffrage, labor and welfare rights, voting and civil rights, and gender discrimination.

In Defense of the United States Constitution

In Defense of the United States Constitution PDF Author: Robert S. Singh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351117688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Constitutional reform is a topic of perennial academic debate, perhaps now more than ever amid sharp polarization in the electorate and government. At once a cogent, new contribution to the scholarly literature and appropriate for American politics and government students, this book mounts a provocative, nonideological defense of the US Constitution, directly engaging proposals for reform and providing a rare systematic argument for continuity: Our politics may be broken but our system is not. Writing from an international perspective with an array of fascinating data, the author draws on theory, law, and history to defend the republican order under political stress and intellectual challenge.

Constitutional Orphan

Constitutional Orphan PDF Author: Paula A. Monopoli
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190092807
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
An account of the ramifications of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the divisions it created in the courts and Congress, and in the women's movement itself. Constitutional Orphan explores the role of former suffragists in the constitutional development of the Nineteenth Amendment, during the decade following its ratification in 1920. It examines the pivot to new missions, immediately after ratification, by two national suffrage organizations, the National Woman's Party and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. The NWP turned from suffrage to a federal equal rights amendment. NAWSA became the National League of Women Voters, and turned to voter education and social welfare legislation. The book then connects that pivot by both groups, to the emergence of a thin conception of the Nineteenth Amendment, as a matter of constitutional interpretation. It surfaces the history around the Congressional failure to enact enforcement legislation, pursuant to the Nineteenth, and connects that with the NWP's perceived need for southern Congressional votes for the ERA. It also explores the choice to turn away from African American women suffragists asking for help to combat voter suppression efforts, after the November 1920 presidential election; and then evaluates the deep divisions among NWP members, some of whom were social feminists who opposed the ERA, and the NLWV, which supported the social feminists in that opposition. The book also analyzes how state courts, left without federal enforcement legislation to constrain or guide them, used strict construction to cabin the emergence of a more robust interpretation of the Nineteenth. It concludes with an examination of new legal scholarship, which suggests broader ways in which the Nineteenth could be used today to expand gender equality.

A Federal Right to Education

A Federal Right to Education PDF Author: Kimberly Jenkins Robinson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479825891
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
How the United States can provide equal educational opportunity to every child The United States Supreme Court closed the courthouse door to federal litigation to narrow educational funding and opportunity gaps in schools when it ruled in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez in 1973 that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to education. Rodriguez pushed reformers back to the state courts where they have had some success in securing reforms to school funding systems through education and equal protection clauses in state constitutions, but far less success in changing the basic structure of school funding in ways that would ensure access to equitable and adequate funding for schools. Given the limitations of state school funding litigation, education reformers continue to seek new avenues to remedy inequitable disparities in educational opportunity and achievement, including recently returning to federal court. This book is the first comprehensive examination of three issues regarding a federal right to education: why federal intervention is needed to close educational opportunity and achievement gaps; the constitutional and statutory legal avenues that could be employed to guarantee a federal right to education; and, the scope of what a federal right to education should guarantee. A Federal Right to Education provides a timely and thoughtful analysis of how the United States could fulfill its unmet promise to provide equal educational opportunity and the American Dream to every child, regardless of race, class, language proficiency, or neighborhood.

The People’s Constitution

The People’s Constitution PDF Author: John F. Kowal
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975629
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change. The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy. From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.

Harvard Law Review: Volume 131, Number 4 - February 2018

Harvard Law Review: Volume 131, Number 4 - February 2018 PDF Author: Harvard Law Review
Publisher: Quid Pro Books
ISBN: 1610277740
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description


The Constitution in Jeopardy

The Constitution in Jeopardy PDF Author: Russ Feingold
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541701542
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
A former U.S. senator joins a legal scholar to examine a hushed effort to radically change our Constitution, offering a warning and a way forward. Over the last two decades, a fringe plan to call a convention under the Constitution's amendment mechanism—the nation's first ever—has inched through statehouses. Delegates, like those in Philadelphia two centuries ago, would exercise nearly unlimited authority to draft changes to our fundamental law, potentially altering anything from voting and free speech rights to regulatory and foreign policy powers. Such a watershed moment would present great danger, and for some, great power. In this important book, Feingold and Prindiville distill extensive legal and historical research and examine the grave risks inherent in this effort. But they also consider the role of constitutional amendment in modern life. Though many focus solely on judicial and electoral avenues for change, such an approach is at odds with a cornerstone ideal of the Founding: that the People make constitutional law, directly. In an era defined by faction and rejection of long-held norms, The Constitution in Jeopardy examines the nature of constitutional change and asks urgent questions about what American democracy is, and should be.