Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
27 Constitutional Amendments · Acedra
Home
Explore
History
27 Constitutional Amendments
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
46 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:11
[MUSIC] Today we're going to talk about the 27 constitutional amendments. How do we amend the Constitution? Article V has two steps, proposal and ratification. Let's walk through them. Proposal, there are two methods for proposing new constitutional amendments. First, Congress can propose an amendment if there are 2/3 votes in both houses of Congress and that's been the pathway for every amendment to the Constitution so far. Second, Article V gives the states a way to work around Congress.
0:43
If Congress refuses to act on proposals for constitutional reform, state legislatures have the power under Article V to force Congress to call a convention for proposing amendments whenever the legislatures of 2/3 of the several states apply for one. That's the proposal phase. What about the ratification phase? Article V sets out two pathways for ratifying a new constitutional amendment, and Congress gets to choose which pathway to use.
1:09
Amendments can be ratified by the legislatures of 3/4 of the states or by specially elected ratifying conventions in 3/4 of the states. Congress has chosen the state legislatures for the ratification of all but one of our constitutional amendments. We use state conventions for the 21st Amendment, which repeal the Prohibition Amendment. Now, we're going to walk through all 27 amendments. We're going to talk about four different periods of constitutional reform. We'll begin with the Founding Era,
1:45
which gave us our first 12 amendments, including the Bill of Rights. Then we'll talk about the period after the Civil War known as Reconstruction, which gave us the three constitutional amendments that some call our nation's second founding. Then we'll talk about the Progressive Era in the early 1900s, which gave us amendment 16 through 19. We'll end up with a Modern Era which added the remaining eight amendments between 1933-1992. Let's begin with the Founding Era.
2:17
The founding generation added almost 12 amendments in less than two decades, and 10 of them known as the Bill of Rights were proposed by the first Congress in 1789 and ratified very soon after in 1791. The Bill of Rights begins with freedom of conscience, which is protected by the First Amendment. The First Amendment protects five freedoms: religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. Religion protects religious liberty in two ways;
2:55
it guards against government establishments of religion and it protects the free exercise of religion. Those are the core of the rights of conscience. The right to believe or not to believe as we wish, the right to think as we will and speak as we think as Thomas Jefferson so memorably said. Then we come to the speech and press and government can't fine, jail, or punish people based on what they write or say. In fact, government cannot restrict speech unless it's
3:27
intended to and likely to cause imminent violence. That extraordinarily protective test for free speech comes from a Supreme Court case called the Brandenburg case, and makes America the most speech protective country in the world. Now, there are certain contexts where the government can regulate speech like defamation or in public schools, but broadly, the test and it's important to remember is the government can't restrict speech unless it's intended to and likely to cause imminent violence.
4:02
Then we come to assembly and petition. Throughout American history, the right dissent has been crucial. Of course, it was dissent that sparked the American Revolution in that famous speech of James Otis denouncing the writs of assistance that we talked about a while ago. The rights of dissent, including petition and assembly, are protected by the First Amendment. Now, we come to the military amendments, which include the Second and Third amendments.
4:29
The Second Amendment was crucial responding to early concerns about standing armies and the importance of rooting the community safety in citizen-led militias. The Supreme Court recent decisions in the Heller and McDonald case emphasized that the Second Amendment also grants an individual right to keep and bear arms subject to reasonable regulations. Then we come to the Third Amendment, which was crucial in saying that you
5:02
can't be forced by the government to house soldiers in our homes in times of peace. This grew out of the British experience of the Quartering Acts of 1774. The founding generation saw these British abuses as tyrannical and saw this act as invading the sanctity of private property and of the home. Now, we come to the privacy and property amendments protected by the Fourth and Fifth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment can be broken down into two big clauses.
5:31
First, it says that the right of the people to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. Second, it says that there's a warrant exception. It says that no warrants can issue except with probable cause, particularly specifying the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The big idea is that before the government can search your home or seize your property or effects it needs a good reason,
6:01
as well as particularized suspicion. Now, we come to the property protections of the Fifth Amendment. That's the Takings Clause, which is connected to the founding generation's commitment to property rights. The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment protects private property from being taken by the government for public use without just compensation. It means that if the government wants to take your property, it has to be for public use and the government has to pay you a fair price for it.
6:29
Now, we come to fair process, jury rights, and the rights of the accused. These include parts of the 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments. Let's begin with the rest of the Fifth Amendment, which grants rights to criminal defendants, including the right to remain silent and the right against self-incrimination. You know that from the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent. You can also plead the Fifth if you fear self-incrimination.
6:58
The Fifth Amendment also guarantees you a right against double jeopardy. You can't be twice tried for the same offense, you have a right to a grand jury for capital crimes, and you have the right to due process of law that central guarantee that the government cannot deprive any one of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Then we come to the Sixth Amendment, which grants even more rights to criminal defendants. There's a right to a jury trial in criminal cases,
7:26
a right to Counsel. Remember, if you're being interrogated by the police, say the magic words, I want a lawyer and you get one, according to the Sixth Amendment. You also have the right under the Sixth Amendment to a speedy and public trial, you have a right to an impartial jury, the right to be informed of what crime the government is charging against you. There's the Confrontation Clause which grants you a right to cross-examine witnesses against you in person.
7:51
There's the right to compulsory process for witnesses. The court can order someone to appear in court as a witness for the defense. If you do go to trial, you get all of these rights guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, but it's important to remember that most criminal cases in the United States do not go to trial. There are settled by plea bargains. Then we come to the Seventh Amendment, which protects the right to a jury trial in civil, that's non criminal cases.
8:18
This responded to a key concern of the anti-federalist that the original Constitution only protected the right to trial by a jury in criminal cases, and many states didn't protect them for civil cases. Then we come to the Eighth Amendment, which protects the right against cruel and unusual punishment. Excessive bail and excessive fines. It's rooted in the English Bill of Rights and also in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by George Mason,
8:46
that famous anti-Federalist who worried that a new and powerful national government would simply invent new crimes to oppress the American people. Then we come to the Popular Sovereignty Amendments, The 9th and 10th Amendments. The 9th Amendment has been interpreted by many to recognize the existence of natural rights that come from God or nature, not from government. It says that the enumeration of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
9:16
Retained by the people means retained when you move from the state of nature into civil society and The 9th Amendment is designed to respond to James Madison's concern that if you listed certain rights in the Bill of Rights, people might wrongly assume that if a right wasn't written down, it wasn't protected. The 9th Amendment says, don't do that, don't interpret the Bill of Rights to be an exhaustive list. Our rights are so capacious because they come from God or nature,
9:44
they inhere in us as human beings, they're not gifts to the government. They can't be reduced to a single list. Then we come to The 10th Amendment, which reflects the Constitution's commitment to federalism, which is the balance of power between the national government and the states and it's meant to protect the reserved powers of the states. Saying that if a power isn't granted to the Federal Government, then it's retained by the states or the people and that's why we can put The 9th,
10:15
10th amendments together and call them the Popular Sovereignty Amendments. They recognize that the ultimate sovereignty power in America rests not in the federal government or in the States, but in the people themselves. That's the bill of rights. Now we come to The 11th Amendment. Four years after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the American people ratified The 11th Amendment in 1795, which bands the national courts from hearing certain lawsuits against the states.
10:45
Scholars often refer to it as protecting the sovereign immunity of the states. Then we come to The 12th Amendment, which followed the extraordinarily contested election of 1800 between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. You may know it from the musical Hamilton because it indirectly led to the duel that resulted in Hamilton's death. After the cast of the election of 1800, The 12th Amendment altered the Electoral College and addressed the central problem that led to such confusion in 1800,
11:20
under the original Constitution, electors cast ballots not for one presidential candidate, but for two and the second place finisher became the vice president. The framers didn't expect there'd be national parties that nominated candidates and offered their own tickets for president and vice president. But political parties emerged in 1800. The Federalists led by John Adams, the Democratic Republicans led by Jefferson and the two vote system led to this serious political crisis
11:49
where it was very hard to figure out the winner of the election. So following the election of 1800, we reformed the Electoral College and the result was The 12th Amendment, which ensured that electors in the future would still cast two votes, but one of the two votes would be for president and the other one would be for vice president. Now we're going to fast forward to the Reconstruction era amendments. We have to fast forward 60 years because there weren't
12:17
any constitutional amendments during that period. But after the Civil War, the bloodiest in American history, 23,000 died or wounded at Antietam. We ratified three transformative constitutional amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, that began to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence that had been thwarted in the original Constitution, resurrected by Lincoln at Gettysburg and by Frederick Douglass and inscribed into the constitution after the Civil War,
12:54
The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, inscribed the promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution. It made everyone born on American soil a U.S. citizen, overturning the Dred Scott decision, it promised equality or equal protection for all persons, as well as preventing states from denying any person of life, liberty or property without due process.
13:27
It also incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states and ensured that the states couldn't violate the fundamental freedoms like free speech and religious liberty guaranteed in the original Bill of Rights. Finally, we come to The 15th Amendment ratified in 1870, which guaranteed the right to vote free of racial discrimination to all men, White and Black and all three of these amendments gave the national government new powers to enforce their protections.
13:58
Now, the second founding was not perfect. The promise of the Reconstruction Amendments was thwarted almost as soon as they were passed by White supremacy and violence, by racism and indifference, by a desire for reconciliation between the North and the South and by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in the Slaughterhouse Cases reduced the promise of The 14th Amendment to a nullity and ensured that it would take nearly a century of activism and courage culminating in Dr.
14:35
King's speech on them mall to begin to fulfill the promises enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Reconstruction amendments. Then we come to The Progressive Era Amendments between 1913 and 1920. There were four amendments. The 16th Amendment, which was ratified in 1913, gave Congress the power to pass an income tax. In fact, congress had passed and income tax during the Civil War, but the Supreme Court struck it down and
15:04
after lots of activism following the Supreme Courts 1895 decision and the Pollock case, The 16th Amendment was proposed and ratified and we've had a federal income tax ever since. Then we come to The 17th Amendment, which changed a very important structural feature of the original Constitution. The original Constitution gave the power to choose U.S. senators to state legislatures. The 17th Amendment gave that power directly to voters in each state and gives
15:35
us the system we have today where voters select their senators through a popular vote. The 18th Amendment is the Prohibition Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors. It remained alive part of the Constitution for 13 years. Americans soon had second thoughts and repealed it and that's why let's fast forward now to 1933 in the 21st Amendment, which is the only example in American history of
16:05
a constitutional amendment repealing another one in its entirety. Here's the language from the amendment. It says, "The 18th article of amendment to the constitution of the United States is hereby repealed." and that was ratified in 1913. Now we're going to go back to The 19th Amendment, which was ratified in 1920. Extremely important amendment which guaranteed the right to vote free of gender discrimination and culminated nearly a century of activism on behalf of women's suffrage.
16:40
The amendment followed decades of widespread experimentation in the states. Many states had extended the right to vote to women before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. But it would take many years and the hard work of the civil rights movement to make the promise of the 19th Amendment a reality and to extend the right to vote in practice to all women, including women of color. Finally, we come to the modern era where we find the remaining eight amendments to the Constitution,
17:07
which were added little by little between 1933 and 1992. We start with the 20th Amendment ratified in 1933, which reduce the length of time between the most recent set of national elections, and also change when a new Congress and president take office. Before the 20th Amendment, the new president and the new Congress took office in March, the 20th Amendment shifted the startup date to January. It meant that you didn't have lame duck presidents who serve for such a long time.
17:39
Then the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, limited a president to two terms in office. It resurrected the precedent set by President George Washington, who had stepped down after his two terms. That President held for 150 years until Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times in a row. With the 22nd Amendment, the American people re-establish the Washington precedent and wrote it into the Constitution. The 23rd Amendment, ratified in 1961,
18:10
guaranteed the District of Columbia three electoral votes before the amendment, DC residents couldn't vote for president or vice president, now they can. Then we come to the 24th Amendment ratified in 1964, which banned poll taxes in national elections being forced to pay a tax when you vote. It also gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment through appropriate legislation. Southern states have long used poll taxes to keep African Americans from voting.
18:42
When the 24th Amendment is ratified, five states still have poll taxes on the books. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of those laws, as recently as 1937, the 24th Amendment said you can't do that, and two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that all poll taxes in national, state, and local elections were unconstitutional. Then we come to the 25th Amendment ratified in 1967, which deals with presidential secession and in capacity, not secession, succession.
19:16
Secession is when a state secede from the Union, the Civil War established you can't do that. Succession has to do with what happens when a president is incapacitated. This amendment left open several issues that were not clear in the original Constitution, and it emerged as in response to new concerns about presidential and capacity after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and President Eisenhower had also been ill, and the Amendment established a procedure for what
19:47
happens if the President is ill or incapacitated. Then we have the 26th Amendment ratified in 1971. This is an amazing Amendment because it was ratified in only four months after it was proposed. It prevents states from discriminating against voters based on age, if they're 18 years old. Before the 26th Amendment, most states still limited voting to 21 and older. The 26th Amendment is important in response to the Vietnam War, and the basic idea is old enough to fight, old enough to vote,
20:15
and Congress agreed with that, propose the amendment in 1970. The Supreme Court had ruled in that Oregon and Mitchell case that Congress can only lowered the voting age for national elections, not state and local elections. That's why the amendment was proposed by Congress, and it was ratified in only four months in March 1971. That's the shortest period for ratification ever. Finally, we've made it to the finish line, the 27th Amendment.
20:45
The amazing thing about the 27th Amendment is that it was written by James Madison, and actually proposed as part of the what became the original Bill of Rights. It was taken over the finish line, 200 years later by a passionate student who thought it wasn't fair that he'd gotten a bad grade on his homework. Here's what happened, the 27th Amendment prevents members of Congress from raising their own salaries until there's a new election.
21:11
Basically a pay increase can't take effect until the beginning of a new Congress. It eliminates Congress's power to give itself a raise. Was first written in 1789 and proposed as part of the original Bill of Rights. Congress initially proposed 12th Amendments, and what became the 27th Amendment, the pay raise Amendment was the original Second Amendment. But it fell short after it was proposed of the three-quarters of the states necessary to ratify it,
21:39
so it didn't become part of the Constitution along with the rest of the Bill of Rights. The states then basically ignored it for decades. Every now and then another state would vote to ratify it. But fast-forward to 1982, the proposed amendment looked at very few states that ratified it. Then Gregory Watson, who is a sophomore at the University of Texas, got a homework assignment. He was doing his research, he found a chapter in a book that listed amendments that hadn't been ratified,
22:07
and he chose to write his paper about the original Second Amendment, which became the 27th Amendment. His central argument was that the proposal didn't have a time limit on it, and Article 5 doesn't have a time limit either, so the amendment could still be ratified nearly 200 years later. Gregory Watson somehow got a C on his paper. He appealed the grade, the professor wouldn't change it. So Watson decided to appeal to his fellow citizens,
22:31
and he wrote letters to state legislators across the country. Many of them ignored him, but one senator loved the idea, that was Senator William Cohen of Maine, who pushed for ratification in Maine, and succeeded in 1983. This inspired Watson to keep pushing ahead and from there, amendment push gain momentum. There was broader dissatisfaction with Congress in the 1980s, where voters thought that Congress wasn't doing enough to help the American people.
22:56
In 1985, five more state to ratify the amendment. Then finally in 1992, over two centuries after, the first Congress proposed the amendment, 3/4 of the states had ratified it, and the 27th Amendment became part of the Constitution. Now we've walked through all 27th Amendments. [MUSIC]
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat