The Twenty-Seven Amendments, and How Article V Works

Amending the Constitution is meant to be hard. Not impossible, but hard enough that a passing majority cannot do it alone. The framers had just watched the Articles of Confederation fail partly because changing them required the agreement of every state, so they built a process with two stages, each demanding a supermajority. The document has been formally changed twenty-seven times in more than two centuries.

How Article V works

An amendment must first be proposed, and there are two ways to do that:

• By a two-thirds vote of both the House and the Senate. Every amendment now in the Constitution took this route.
• By a convention called by Congress on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the states. This route has never been used, and many of its details, including how delegates would be chosen and whether its subject matter could be limited, have never been settled.

A proposed amendment must then be ratified by three-fourths of the states, which today means thirty-eight of the fifty. Congress chooses between two methods:

• Ratification by state legislatures, used for twenty-six of the twenty-seven.
• Ratification by conventions elected in the states, used exactly once, for the Twenty-First Amendment that repealed Prohibition.

Both stages are unforgiving by design. Thirteen states can block an amendment that the other thirty-seven want, and those thirteen need not be large ones. Supporters of a change therefore have to build agreement that is broad across the country rather than merely deep in one part of it. That is what the framers intended, and it is why the process draws criticism from opposite directions: as too easy to obstruct, and as too loose, since a proposal can sit indefinitely unless Congress supplies a deadline.

The President has no formal role. An amendment is not presented for signature and cannot be vetoed. Since the twentieth century Congress has often attached a ratification deadline, commonly seven years, though nothing requires it to. Article V also places two subjects beyond reach: it barred any amendment before 1808 affecting the clauses that protected the importation of enslaved people, and it provides that no state may be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent. Thousands of amendment proposals have been introduced in Congress over the years. The twenty-seven below are the ones that finished, and the Constitution Annotated carries the full text and drafting history of each.

Amendments Eleven and Twelve: early corrections

The Eleventh (1795) limited federal jurisdiction over suits brought against a state by citizens of another state, reversing the Supreme Court's decision in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793). The Twelfth (1804) repaired a mechanical failure. Under the original rules each elector cast two undifferentiated votes and the runner-up became Vice President, an arrangement that produced a tie and a deadlocked contest in the House after the election of 1800. Since 1804 electors have cast separate ballots for President and Vice President.

Thirteen, Fourteen and Fifteen: the Reconstruction Amendments

The three amendments ratified after the Civil War changed the document more than any others.

The Thirteenth (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, and voided the clause in Article IV requiring the return of people who escaped enslavement. The Fourteenth (1868) is the longest amendment and the most heavily litigated. It granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, forbade the states to abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, to deny due process of law, or to deny any person the equal protection of the laws, and it removed the three-fifths formula from apportionment. It is also the vehicle through which most of the Bill of Rights was later applied to the states. The Fifteenth (1870) barred denial of the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, a guarantee that was widely evaded for nearly a century afterward through devices that were not written in racial terms.

Sixteen through Nineteen: the Progressive Era

Four amendments arrived in rapid succession. The Sixteenth (1913) allowed Congress to tax incomes without apportioning the tax among the states by population. The Seventeenth (1913) replaced selection of senators by state legislatures with direct popular election. The Eighteenth (1919) prohibited the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Nineteenth (1920) provided that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex, at the end of a campaign that had run for more than seventy years.

Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two and Twenty-Five: the machinery

Several amendments simply repair the operation of government. The Twentieth (1933) moved the start of presidential terms to January 20 and congressional terms to January 3, shortening the long "lame duck" interval left over from an era of slow travel. The Twenty-First (1933) repealed the Eighteenth. It is the only amendment to undo another and the only one ratified by state conventions rather than legislatures. The Twenty-Second (1951) limited a President to two elected terms. The Twenty-Fifth (1967) set out procedures for presidential succession, for filling a vacancy in the vice presidency, and for handling a President's inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office.

Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four and Twenty-Six: the vote

The Twenty-Third (1961) gave the District of Columbia electors in presidential elections, capped at the number held by the least populous state. The Twenty-Fourth (1964) abolished poll taxes in federal elections; its text reached no further than federal contests, and the Supreme Court extended the same rule to state elections two years later on equal protection grounds in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966). The Twenty-Sixth (1971) set the voting age at eighteen and was ratified faster than any other amendment, in a little over three months. Taken together with the Fifteenth and the Nineteenth, these are the clearest thread running through the whole set: a steady expansion of who may vote. The National Archives collects the originals among its milestone documents.

The Twenty-Seventh: a two-hundred-year delay

The most recent amendment ratified is also, in a sense, among the first proposed. It provides that a law changing the pay of members of Congress cannot take effect until an election of Representatives has intervened. It went to the states in 1789 as one of the twelve articles that produced the Bill of Rights, fell short, and then sat dormant for nearly two centuries until a college student's research in the early 1980s prompted a fresh round of state ratifications. It was certified in 1992, 202 years after it was proposed, because Congress had attached no deadline to it. It is the best available demonstration that Article V runs on no clock unless somebody sets one.

What has not been ratified

Six amendments have been proposed by Congress and sent to the states without being ratified, among them the 1789 apportionment article and a 1978 proposal to give the District of Columbia full congressional representation. Several of the six carried no deadline and are, on one view, still technically pending. Questions about extending deadlines, and about whether a state may withdraw a ratification it has already given, remain genuinely unsettled and have never been resolved by the Supreme Court.

The record also shows long stretches of stillness. Sixty-one years separate the Twelfth from the Thirteenth, and forty-three separate the Fifteenth from the Sixteenth. More than thirty years have now passed since the Twenty-Seventh was certified. Amendment is not the ordinary way American constitutional change happens, which is part of why judicial interpretation carries the load it does. Our timeline places each ratified amendment in sequence, and the page on founding documents explains where the amendment power came from in the first place.