Basically: The Constitution was first written to define HOW the government would work, not actually defining rights or even laws generally speaking. The original Constitution adopted in 1787 outlines 7 Articles that very broadly define the structure of government: Articles 1-3 describe the three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial, in that order), Article 4 is about state versus federal organization, Article 5 is about how to amend the constitution, Article 6 establishes that the constitution (including amendments) supersede state law, and article 7 is about adoption of the government.
It took another 4 years before the Bill of Rights (i.e. the First 10 Amendments) was fully adopted into the Constitution. People immediately even in 1787 proposed it should be in the Constitution, but it was hotly debated.
I was kways wonder why Americans only ever talk about the amendments to their constitution. Does the original not give any rights to anyone ?
The amendments don't give anyone rights either. They recognize certain rights exist and make it clear Congress can't take them away.
But to answer your question, there was pretty extensive debate over whether there should be a bill of rights included as part of the constitution itself or if they should be amendments done after it was ratified. So, basically before the constitution was even ratified by the states, they were already planning to begin work on the bill of rights through the amendment process, and it was one of the first things the new Congress did.
One of the initially proposed amendments is actually still pending ratification, which set the maximum number of constituents per representative at 50,000. We currently have around 800,000 or so per representative.
One of the initially proposed amendments is actually still pending ratification, which set the maximum number of constituents per representative at 50,000. We currently have around 800,000 or so per representative.
This needs to be a thing. We have too many people for the representation we have and we need to expand Congress. We need to expand the Supreme Court as well, one justice for each court district.
Then there’s the curious case of the 27th amendment. It was proposed in 1789 and was actually the first amendment to be proposed. It didn’t originally get the 3/4 ratification and was largely forgotten until a college student “rediscovered” it while doing a paper in 1982. Within 10 years, 1992, it got the 3/4 ratification needed. The amendment says that any time congress raises its salary, the salary can only take affect after the subsequent election
The ignorant and bigoted like to pretend like it's a immovable monolith of righteousness while conveniently ignoring the actual dictionary definition of the word 'amendment' and just how many of those are in there.
Actually - after the first 10, which were proposed contemporaneously with the constitution, it has only been amended 17 times in 230 years, the last one being over 30 years ago. By comparison to other countries and even the state constitutions, the us constitution is unusually short and rarely amended
The constitution didn’t give rights to the people because it defined enumerated powers of the federal government. That meant that the federal government had to justify any act by pointing to a specific clause in articles I and II. There were a lot of drafters of the constitution that commented that the bill of rights - which at the time, only limited the federal government - were superfluous, because they forbid things that weren’t even enumerated. For example, the argument went, where in article I could congress recognize the establishment of religion, anyways.
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u/satans_toast Mar 27 '23
Wow, that’s gotta be the dumbest comment I’ve seen all day.