How can amend the constitution

The national archivist sends notification and materials to the governor of each state. Step 3. Ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Ratification of the amendment language adopted by Congress is an up-or-down vote in each legislative chamber. A state legislature cannot change the language. If it does, its ratification is invalid. Step 4. Tracking state actions. Proposed amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states in order to take effect. Congress may set a time limit for state action. Legislatures must return specific materials to show proof of ratification. Having Senators elected by the people, instead of by state legislators, may have been a big change.

But the Seventeenth Amendment did not have much to do with it. Before the Seventeenth Amendment was adopted, most states had already cleverly figured out ways to make sure that the people—not state legislators—elected Senators.

All of that happened before the Constitution was amended. You can compare this change to a change in the way we elect the President. Formally, the President is elected by electors, not by the voters directly. Originally, the idea was that electors would be people with good judgment who would make up their own minds about who should be President.

Now, for practical purposes, the electors vote automatically for the candidate who won the vote in their state. No constitutional amendment authorized this major change. Congress approved the amendment, but not enough states did, so it never became part of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court interpreted other parts of the Constitution to prevent sex discrimination, and today it is hard to identify any way in which the law would be different if the ERA had been formally added to the Constitution.

The Fifteenth Amendment supposedly guaranteed that people could not be kept from voting because of their race. It was added to the Constitution in But well into the middle of the twentieth century, African-Americans in many parts of the United States were kept from voting by illegal means.

If you just picked up a copy of the Constitution and read it, you would be completely misled about this disgraceful history. The Fourteenth Amendment , adopted in , had a similar fate.

It was intended to prevent many forms of discrimination against minorities. But its promise was not realized until almost a century later, during the civil rights era. A case can be made that the earliest constitutional amendments did matter.

That would include the Bill of Rights, for example, and the Twelfth Amendment , which fixed a problem in the way the President and Vice President were originally chosen. And several amendments have been useful housekeeping measures, like the Twenty-Fifth Amendment , which says what happens if the President is disabled.

But if you really want to understand how the United States Constitution changes—in practice, not just on paper—constitutional amendments are a small part of the story. The real action—in many ways, our real Constitution—is elsewhere, in the way the courts, Congress, the President, and the people in their daily lives have brought us the Constitution we have today.

The amendment process, however, has been criticized for having two defects. One is that it is too strict and therefore makes it too difficult to enact amendments. The other is that it is biased in favor of the federal government and therefore does not allow amendments that would limit the national government.

If the original meaning were consistently followed, both of the defects would be eliminated. Some critics of originalism argue that the amendment process is too strict because it is difficult to secure approval by two-thirds of both Houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Therefore, these critics contend the Supreme Court should engage in nonoriginalist judicial interpretation to allow for modern circumstances and values to be incorporated into the Constitution.

The amendment process, however, is not too strict to allow for constitutional change. It is true that the process does require amendments to be supported by a consensus.

See John O. Rappaport, Originalism and the Good Constitution Among amendments adopted this century are those that gave women the right to vote; enacted and repealed Prohibition; abolished poll taxes; and lowered the minimum voting age from 21 to The amendment process is very difficult and time consuming: A proposed amendment must be passed by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

The ERA Amendment did not pass the necessary majority of state legislatures in the s. Another option to start the amendment process is that two-thirds of the state legislatures could ask Congress to call a Constitutional Convention. A new Constitutional Convention has never happened, but the idea has its backers. The inclusion of these rights in the constitution would very much be in doubt had the political instances considered that there is an unconditional obligation of satisfying rights guaranteed by judicial bodies.

A good question is whether we can actually guarantee their right to decent housing, nutritious food and water? And whether the relevant political authorities view these rights as normative provisions? The answer is simple. The inclusion of such rights was regarded as a political and programmatic declaration, and not destined to become a normative force, at least for the time being. Regulatory articles are both a cause and a consequence of constant amendments.

The very specific nature of the rules established in constitutional articles is perplexing. Such level of detail comprises a concrete system that sets a variety of rules which cannot be amended by the corresponding provisions of relevant statutes.

In this way, the Constitution becomes a secondary regulation, an ordinary law that contains the concrete rules governing individual cases instead of functioning as a framework of principles these rules should expound. Detailed dispositions in a constitution create constant problems as the amendment of such provisions necessarily requires an amendment to the Constitution itself.

A good example is the case of Article Originally, Article 41 consisted of a single, 7-line paragraph. Those 7 lines contained 63 words. Currently, Article 41 has more than 70 paragraphs with nearly words. The level of detail in Article 41 which currently regulates political parties and electoral administration is truly surprising.

It defines political parties and their creation, mathematical formulas for calculating public financing for political parties, percentages and differentiations of the financing depending on the type of election. It also sets rules for pre-campaigns, specifies the number of minutes honestly, the number of minutes! In conclusion, Article 41 is clearly set up as an Electoral Code.

The Constitution itself which disposes that such media time is distributed between 6. Therefore, simple amendments which in other countries would imply changing a regulation enacted by the executive power or at most a statutory provision imply here a change in the constitutional text.

The same case could be put forward with many provisions. Article 2 recognizes the rights of indigenous populations in Mexico. However, it also determinates the criteria for their recognition, grants them autonomy in the exercise of their right to self-determination and defines all the rights, one by one, which stem from this recognition.

It establishes the obligation of the Federation and Federal Entities in these matters and even states that certain budget items related to indigenous rights should be included in the general budget. Even the legislative faculties of the Federation suffer to a degree from this regulatory nature.

Article 73 defines the legislative powers of the Federation, but in many cases it does so somewhat specifically. Such way of defining powers has two main problems. In the first place, it questions the concept of a federalist system in which the Federation refuses to allow the consolidation of powers granted to the states in virtue of the closing clause this will be discussed in the following section.

In second place, it refuses to see the Constitution and federal powers as part of a constitutional system, which should be interpreted as a whole. In this sense, Congress and political actors feel that the scope of power of each must be expressly stated in the Constitution under specific terms. Otherwise, why does the Federal Congress have the power to enact a law that creates the Federal Administrative Court, but not the power to regulate administrative justice at a federal level?

Why can the Federal Congress impose taxes on beer and not on alcoholic beverages? It should not be forgotten that the Constitution itself provides a system of implicit powers.

A constitution can be interpreted by courts, political actors, branches of government and other relevant agents. Not everything has to be described word for word in the constitutional text. Centralization can be deemed a true underlying cause of constitutional amendments.

As in the case of the other amendments, amendments to Article 73 have increased with political pluralism. In the first 82 years of the constitutional text, there was a rate of 0. However, centralization is not only externalized through legislative powers.

For example, an in-depth amendment of Article 41 was required to centralize electoral administration. A similar case can be put forward regarding the organizational of states.

The Constitution has been progressively amended to impose specific organizational rules on the states, rules that basically define all their local constitutional elements. Consider the case of Articles and , which altogether summed up to 8 paragraphs in the original Constitution and now have a total of paragraphs.

Even though the abovementioned articles should presumably provide a general framework of Federal Entities, the truth is that the free scope of the states is much diminished.

Article organizes municipalities and establishes their relationship with states, branches and powers. Article regulates the internal organization of states, the organization of the three branches of local government, some constitutional autonomous organs to be created, auditing provisions, electoral administration, the regulation of local political parties, the administrative responsibility of the local judiciary, etc.

These two articles combined have undergone 28 constitutional amendments. Arguably, most of these amendments reduce state powers regarding the self-determination of their constitutional organization by imposing certain conditions on them. Evidently and despite the abovementioned causes, an amendment procedure that has allowed more than changes to the text through amendment decrees raises doubts. I do not think the procedure is extremely flexible. However, given that potential amendments to the procedure have been proposed, I have analyzed some of the potential normative changes that could solidify the procedure established in Article elsewhere.

The Chamber of Deputies is composed of representatives while members form the Senate. This means that The absence of any deputies and senators at their respective sessions should not alter the required quorum.

If there is no interest in attending the respective session, it should be interpreted as a lack of interest in amending the Constitution. Secondly, same considerations could apply to the required majority for Federal Entities. Finally, under certain conditions other possible mechanisms would be to introduce a referendum for the approval of such amendments or to establish a minimum deliberation period from 3 to 6 months as in Italy to avoid fasttrack amendments.

This article has shown that there is an impressive rate of constitutional amendments in Mexico. Hesse's remark is still valid today. Constant amendments under the pretext of seemingly ineluctable political needs endanger the normative force of the Constitution.

In the Mexican case, perhaps this instability can account not only for the present constant constitutional amendments, but also for historical constitutional changes in the Constitution of Cadiz, the Constitution of Apatzingan, the Federal Constitution, the Centralist Constitution, the Constitution and the Constitution. Mexican constitutional history is riddled with different constitutions with limited force.

Is it not possible that these dynamics has been passed on in the constitutional amendment rate of the Constitution? Can such rate be explained as part of the elasticity offered by flexible constitutions under the pretext of revolutions, civil war or, in the Mexican case, constant major political changes? After the Mexican Revolution, the Constitution offered a social framework that institutionalized political demands. Constant amendments served as proof of a lack of the establishment of a strong system and the attention given to different demands in the form of political declarations in the constitution.

It has been argued in this article that there is no single cause for the constant amendments made to the Mexican Constitution. The amendments obey a complex structural framework, which includes partially the hegemony of a political party, a political conception of the Constitution, the regulatory nature of its provisions, an ongoing centralization process and perhaps too an amendment procedure that is unable to contain particular political dynamics.

The constant amendments have considerably damaged our constitutional system by preventing the consolidation of political institutions and producing an incoherent and overwhelmingly detailed regulatory text. However, in this specific case, normative solutions are unable to give a definitive answer to the problem. Either changing the amendment procedure a normative padlock or restructuring the Constitution addressing the negative effects of the amendments cannot be done by disregarding the underlying causes for the amendments.

Overlooking the causes would result in the continuance of this Perpetuum Mobile Constitutio. Currently working at the Mexican Supreme Court. Lecturer on Constitutional Law at Universidad Iberoamericana. Twitter: MauroArturo. I am grateful to Barbara Stepien, Yessica Esquivel and Armando Salas for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

The usual disclaimer applies.. See Bryce , supra note 1 at Curtin and T. Heukels eds. I use a period of 4. Counting a full year in December in which the current President took office or January and February would distort the results.. Algunas reflexiones y seis propuestas, 24 Cuestiones Constitucionales , Imer B. Several authors have claimed that there are only two constitutional amendment procedures, thus arguing implicitly that the territorial procedures are just variations of a territorial amendment procedure.

In this case, we have a flexible amendment procedure. Flores , supra note 20 at , Bryce , supra note 1 at Italics are mine.. Carbonell , supra note 24 at This table 3 represents the political composition of the Senate. Senators are elected for a 6 years term. The upper number represents the number of senitors a party obtained in the Senate in the respective year.