Difference between revisions of "Amendment Process"

Revision as of 15:26, 13 January 2017

Amendment Process The Constitution of the United States, as originally written, contained only 7,000 words. However, the authors recognized the necessity of amend- ing the document. The Articles of Confederation, the governing document that pre- ceded the Constitution, required the approval of all states, which complicated the amending of the Articles and ultimately led to the writing of the Constitution.Such matters were explicitly left to the states “to retain to themselves the right of judg- ing how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged.” The resolutions incurred their own strong opposition, and it appears that popularly, people were just as much troubled by the prospects of disunion as they were of op- pression by the general government. The Federalists were able to rescue the alien and sedition laws from two nearly successful Republican campaigns to repeal them. In the end, however, the controversial laws were simply allowed to expire after Jefferson’s as- sumption of the presidency in 1800.