What Changes Do Citizens Want For Our Constitution

The U.Due south. Constitution, written in 1787 and ratified by ix of the original 13 states a yr after, is the world's longest-surviving written constitution. But that doesn't mean it has stayed the same over time.

The Founding Fathers intended the document to exist flexible in order to fit the changing needs and circumstances of the country. In the words of Virginia delegate Edmund Randolph, one of the five men tasked with drafting the Constitution, the goal was to "insert essential principles only, lest the operations of authorities should exist clogged past rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable, which ought to be accommodated to times and events."

Since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1791, Congress has passed merely 23 additional amendments to the Constitution, and the states have ratified only 17 of them. Beyond that, many changes in the American political and legal system accept come through judicial interpretation of existing laws, rather than the addition of new ones past the legislative branch.

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Rights of Private Americans Were Protected

One of the biggest early criticisms of the Constitution was that information technology did non do plenty to protect the rights of individuals confronting infringement by the nation's new central government. To remedy this, James Madison immediately drafted a list of rights for citizens that the federal government did not have the ability to take away. Included in this Bill of Rights were freedom of organized religion, speech and of the printing, the right to comport arms, the right to a trial by jury and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

How Americans Elect Presidents, VPs and Senators Changed

The Constitution stated that the runner-up in the presidential election would become the vice president—a system that about sparked a constitutional crisis in 1800, when Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, received the same number of balloter votes. The twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, mandated that electors vote separately for president and vice president.

More than a century afterward, the 17th Subpoena similarly inverse the election process for the U.South. Senate, giving the American people—rather than country legislatures—the correct to elect senators.

The Supreme Court's Role Expanded

Sentry: The Supreme Court

In comparison to its handling of the executive and legislative branches of government, the Constitution itself remained relatively vague on the role of the Supreme Court and the judicial branch, leaving its arrangement largely upwards to Congress.

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It was John Marshall, the nation's fourth chief justice, who established the ability of the Court past asserting its right to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. "It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Section to say what the law is," Marshall wrote in the landmark case Marbury v. Madison (1803). Since then, the Court has taken an increasingly agile part in interpreting the laws made and actions taken by the other ii branches, and ensuring that both abide past the Constitution.

Residuum of Ability Tipped From the states to Federal Government

At the fourth dimension the Constitution was written, private state governments were more powerful than the new nation's key government. That residual of ability quickly changed over the years, equally the federal government expanded and took an increasingly dominant part.

Federalism became the police of the land thank you to Supreme Court decisions like McCulloch v. Maryland (1823), which affirmed the federal regime'southward right to take actions "necessary and proper" to meet the urgent needs of the nation.

Fence over the issue of states' rights continued up to (and beyond) the Civil War, when the Union victory and the dawn of Reconstruction marked the beginning of a new expansion of federal power. Passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913 gave the government the ability to collect income tax, a change that effectively reversed the prohibition against a "direct tax" included in Article I of the Constitution.

People Other Than White Men Gained the Correct to Vote

How the U.S. Constitution Has Changed and Expanded Since 1787 — Black men voting in a significant election following the Civil War, 1867.

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In the Ceremonious War's aftermath, 3 "Reconstruction Amendments" sought to more fully realize the founders' platonic of all men being created equal. While the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States, the 14th Amendment extended the status of citizens to African Americans, contradicting the Supreme Court'southward ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

The 15th Amendment ensured voting rights to Black men (although Southern states would soon find ways to restrict those rights). In 1920, subsequently ratification of the 19th Amendment gave voting rights to all American women for the first time, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt memorably alleged that "To go the word 'male' in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the state l-two years of pauseless entrada."

PHOTOS: Women'south Suffrage

The Executive Branch'southward Power Expanded

Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, Congress was the dominant branch of regime, equally the framers of the Constitution intended. Though some earlier presidents—including Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—claimed more powers for themselves, especially in wartime, the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt marked a turning bespeak in the expansion of executive power. Despite passage of the 22nd Amendment, which limited hereafter presidents to only 2 terms in office, the growing power of the presidency was a trend that showed no signs of slowing down.

Corporations Accept Begun to Be Treated as Individuals

The Constitution doesn't mention corporations or their rights, nor does the 14th Amendment. Simply beginning in the tardily 19th century, with its verdict in Santa Clara County 5. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886), the Supreme Court began recognizing a corporation equally a "person" with all the rights that entailed. Subsequently Courtroom rulings—including a 5-4 decision in the notable Kickoff Amendment case Citizens United vs. FEC (2010)—expanded this controversial application of the 14th Amendment to protecting corporations from certain types of government regulation. In his Citizens United dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens turned once again to the nation's founding certificate, arguing that "Corporations…are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."