Amending the Constitution Featuring Justice Neil M. Gorsuch
About this video
This video explains Article 5, which lets Americans amend the Constitution. The founders wanted future generations to perfect the Constitution without revolution, but set a high bar: proposal by two-thirds of Congress or a convention called by two-thirds of states, and ratification by three-fourths of the states. Justice Neil Gorsuch tells how a college student revived a Madison amendment that became the 27th Amendment in 1992.
You'll be able to
- explain why the founders included a process for amending the Constitution.
- describe the two ways to propose and the two ways to ratify an amendment.
- explain how a young person helped get the most recent amendment adopted.
Key words
- amend
- To formally change or add to a document such as the Constitution.
- Article 5
- The part of the Constitution that sets out how amendments are proposed and ratified.
- ratify
- To formally approve; an amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
- convention
- A formal meeting of representatives called to propose or approve changes.
- Enlightenment
- An 18th-century movement that valued reason, learning and human progress.
Transcript
Video Title: Amending the Constitution Featuring Justice Neil M. Gorsuch Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqwP7mteNqU Transcript generated by YouTube Transcript Generator - Extract transcripts from any YouTube video instantly at https://transcriptgenerator.org ======================================== the national constitution center presents constitutional questions with supreme court justice neil gorsuch article 5 amending the constitution in the constitution our founders created the greatest charter of freedom in the history of the world they understood however that they didn't have a monopoly on constitutional wisdom and that's why they put in place a process for amending the constitution so that future generations
could continue to use our foundational document to form a more perfect union the founders were themselves constitutional reformers they were men of the enlightenment they believed in human progress and learning from history and political theory they wanted us to continue to perfect their framework without resorting to revolution which as they all knew was often violent and destructive in article 5 the founders offered us a formal process for amending the constitution but the founders set a high bar for doing so to limit it to changes that had broad support the constitution spells out more than one way for amendments to be proposed and ratified an amendment can be proposed either in congress or by the states
if in congress two-thirds of the senate and the house of representatives must approve the amendment in the states two-thirds of them must call for a convention to approve an amendment if either of those things happen the amendment moves on to the states for ratification it must be ratified by three-fourths of the states to become part of the constitution and that can happen either by a vote in the state legislature or by the state itself holding a ratifying convention and now supreme court justice neil gorsuch tells us more about our right to amend the constitution we can amend our constitution people forget about that but for most of our history we had an amendment every 7 or 10 years and that can be done by convention as well as through legislative processes and if people
think sometimes it can't happen well the last one happened in 1992 and it james madison had role there too but so did a young person in college a young person wrote a paper about a an amendment that madison had drafted but they didn't didn't go anywhere back at the founding and it had to do with salaries for congress persons and whether they could be raised in the same term that congress is serving or whether they could only take effect in the future for the next congress and this young person thought that was a great amendment and it had been ratified by a number of states but not quite enough to become a part of the constitution and then about in 1992 this young person picked it up wrote a paper i think got a poor grade
for the paper but managed to start a movement to get this madisonian amendment 200 years later adopted and it is the most recent amendment to the united states constitution so there you go we the people can through that kind of process still have that kind of referendum activity
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