All the Amendments: How the Constitution Has Changed

How an amendment is made

The people who wrote the Constitution knew they could not foresee every problem the country would face. So they wrote into it a way to change it. That way is described in Article V. (The Constitution is divided into seven main sections called articles, and Article V is the fifth one.)

In plain words: Making an amendment takes two steps. First, the amendment must be proposed, which means formally put forward for approval. Second, it must be ratified, which means approved by the states. Only after both steps does it become part of the Constitution.

Step one: proposing an amendment

There are two ways to propose an amendment.

• By Congress. Two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the Senate vote to propose it. All twenty-seven amendments were proposed this way.
• By a national convention. If the legislatures of two-thirds of the states ask for it, Congress must call a convention, which is a meeting of representatives gathered for a special purpose. That convention can propose amendments. This way has never been used.

Step two: ratifying an amendment

There are also two ways to ratify an amendment. Congress chooses which one will be used.

• By state legislatures. The legislatures of three-fourths of the states vote to approve it. Twenty-six of the twenty-seven amendments were ratified this way.
• By state conventions. Each state holds a special convention, and conventions in three-fourths of the states vote to approve it. This way has been used only once, for the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933, which ended the national ban on alcohol. (Part 7 explains why.)

Two more facts about Article V are worth knowing. The president has no formal part in the process. An amendment does not go to the president to be signed, and the president cannot veto it. And when the Constitution is amended, the old words are not erased. The amendment is added at the end, and any part of the original text it changes simply no longer has force.

Why it was made hard on purpose

The founders wanted a Constitution that could be changed, but only when a large share of the country agreed. They did not want the basic rules of government to shift every time one party won an election. Under the Articles of Confederation, the plan of government before the Constitution, changes needed the approval of every single state, and no change was ever made. Article V was meant to avoid both problems. Under it, change would be possible, but difficult.

The result is that very few proposals succeed. Since 1789, members of Congress have introduced more than eleven thousand proposed amendments. Only thirty-three were approved by Congress and sent to the states, and only twenty-seven were ratified. Two of the ones that failed are worth knowing about. A Child Labor Amendment, which would have let Congress limit the work of people under eighteen, was sent to the states in 1924 and was never ratified by enough of them. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would have forbidden denying equal rights on account of sex, was sent to the states in 1972. It did not reach thirty-eight states before the deadline Congress had set, and people still argue over whether it can count.

Drills for this part: II.24 How an amendment is made: the steps in order. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

The Bill of Rights: Amendments 1 to 10

Many Americans refused to support the new Constitution in 1787 and 1788 unless a list of rights was added to it. They feared that a strong national government could take away the freedoms they had fought the Revolution for. James Madison wrote the amendments, the first Congress proposed them in 1789, and the states ratified ten of them in 1791. Those first ten amendments are called the Bill of Rights. They have their own page on this site, The Bill of Rights, which goes through each one slowly. Here they are in one line each.

At first, the Bill of Rights limited only the national government. It did not stop a state government from, for example, punishing someone for his religion. That changed slowly after the Fourteenth Amendment, as Part 4 explains.

Fixing how the government works

Some amendments were written to fix a problem in how the government runs: how officials are chosen, when they take office, how long they may serve, and what happens if a president dies. Each one came after something went wrong, or after people saw that something could. This part covers six of them: the Eleventh, Twelfth, Twentieth, Twenty-second, Twenty-fifth, and Twenty-seventh.

The Eleventh Amendment (1795): suits against a state

In plain words: A person from one state, or from another country, cannot sue a state government in a federal court. ("Construed" means understood or interpreted. A "suit" is a lawsuit.)

Why it happened. In 1793, in a case called Chisholm v. Georgia, the Supreme Court allowed a man from South Carolina to sue the state of Georgia over money owed for supplies bought during the Revolution. Many states owed large debts from the war, and they were alarmed that they could now be dragged into federal court by people they owed. Congress proposed the Eleventh Amendment the next year to overturn the decision.

The Twelfth Amendment (1804): separate votes for president and vice president

The president is not chosen directly by the voters. The president is chosen by the Electoral College, a group of people called electors whom each state chooses. Each state gets as many electors as it has members of Congress. Under the original Constitution, each elector cast two votes for president. The person with the most votes became president, and the person in second place became vice president.

Why it happened. This plan caused two problems. In 1796, John Adams won and his political rival, Thomas Jefferson, came in second, so the president and vice president were from opposing parties. Then, in the election of 1800, Jefferson and his own running mate, Aaron Burr, each received 73 electoral votes. They were tied, even though everyone knew Jefferson was meant to be president. The House of Representatives had to decide, and it took 36 rounds of voting before Jefferson was chosen.

In plain words: Electors now cast one vote for president and a separate vote for vice president. ("Distinct" means separate.) This is how the Electoral College still works today.

The Twentieth Amendment (1933): the "lame duck" amendment

In plain words: A new president takes office on January 20 after the November election. A new Congress begins on January 3.

Why it happened. Before this amendment, a newly elected president did not take office until March 4, four months after the election. During those months, the outgoing president and the members of Congress who had lost their elections still held power. An official who is serving out the last part of a term after someone else has been chosen to replace him is called a lame duck, because he has little power left to get things done. The long wait became a serious problem in the winter of 1932 to 1933, during the Great Depression, when banks were failing and the outgoing president, Herbert Hoover, and the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did not agree on what to do. The amendment was ratified in January 1933, too late to shorten that winter. The new date for the president was first used for the start of Roosevelt's second term, on January 20, 1937.

The Twenty-second Amendment (1951): two terms for a president

In plain words: A person can be elected president no more than two times. The amendment also says that a person who has served more than two years of someone else's term (for example, a vice president who took over when a president died) can be elected only once more. So the longest anyone can serve as president is about ten years.

Why it happened. George Washington chose to step down after two terms, and for nearly 150 years no president served more than two terms. Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the tradition. He was elected four times, in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, and led the country through the Great Depression and most of World War II. He died in office in April 1945. Two years later, in 1947, Congress proposed an amendment to turn the two-term tradition into a rule, and the states ratified it in 1951.

The Twenty-fifth Amendment (1967): when a president dies, resigns, or cannot serve

In plain words: If the president dies, resigns, or is removed, the vice president becomes president. If the office of vice president is empty, the president chooses a new vice president, and that person takes office once a majority of both the House and the Senate approve. The amendment also says what happens if a president is too sick or injured to do the job. The president can hand power to the vice president for a time by sending a written statement to Congress. And if the president cannot or will not do that, the vice president and a majority of the cabinet (the heads of the main government departments) can declare that the president is unable to serve.

Why it happened. The original Constitution was unclear about these questions. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson became president, and there was no vice president at all until after the next election. There was also no clear plan for a president who was alive but unable to work. Congress proposed the amendment in 1965 to settle these questions, and the states ratified it in 1967. It was soon put to use. In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned, and President Richard Nixon chose Gerald Ford to replace him. In 1974, Nixon resigned, and Ford became president. Ford then chose Nelson Rockefeller as vice president. For a time, neither the president nor the vice president had been elected to that office.

The Twenty-seventh Amendment (1992): when Congress raises its own pay

In plain words: If Congress votes to change its own pay, the change cannot begin until after the next election for the House of Representatives. ("Compensation" means pay. "Intervened" means come in between.) This way, members of Congress cannot vote themselves a raise and collect it right away. Voters first get a chance to vote them out.

Why it happened. This amendment took longer to ratify than any other. James Madison proposed it in 1789, as one of the twelve amendments Congress sent to the states. Ten of those twelve became the Bill of Rights. This one was not ratified by enough states, and it was mostly forgotten, because no deadline had been set. In 1982, Gregory Watson, a student at the University of Texas, wrote a paper about it for a class. He then began writing letters to state legislators, asking them to ratify it. State after state did, and in 1992 it reached three-fourths of the states, 203 years after it was proposed.

Drills for this part: II.25 The amendments that changed how government works. All the drills are on the Social Studies Drills page.

The Second Founding, after the Civil War

The original Constitution protected slavery. It counted an enslaved person as three-fifths of a person when deciding how many representatives a state would get, and it required free states to return people who had escaped from slavery. In 1857, in the Dred Scott case, the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, whether enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States.

The Civil War (1861 to 1865) ended with the defeat of the Southern states that had tried to leave the Union to protect slavery. In the next five years, three amendments changed the Constitution so deeply that some historians call them the Second Founding: a second creation of the country on new terms. They are the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, often called the Reconstruction Amendments. (Reconstruction is the name for the period from 1865 to 1877, when the national government worked to rebuild the South and bring the Southern states back into the Union.) Each of the three ends with a section saying that Congress shall have power to enforce it "by appropriate legislation," which means by passing laws.

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865): the end of slavery

In plain words: Slavery and forced labor are not allowed anywhere in the United States. ("Involuntary servitude" means being forced to work for another person against your will. "Jurisdiction" means the area under a government's authority.) There is one exception: forced labor is allowed as a punishment for a person who has been properly convicted of a crime.

Why it happened. President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared enslaved people free only in the areas still fighting against the Union, and it was a wartime order that a later court or Congress might undo. Lincoln and his allies wanted slavery ended everywhere, permanently, in the Constitution itself. Congress proposed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865, and it was ratified in December 1865, eight months after the war ended and after Lincoln had been assassinated.

The exception. The words "except as a punishment for crime" have had serious effects. After the war, many Southern states passed laws called black codes, which limited what freed Black people could do. Some of these laws made it a crime to be without a job, a crime called vagrancy. People arrested under such laws could be forced to work, and many states rented out prisoners to private companies, such as mines and plantations, a practice called convict leasing. Today, people in prison in the United States can still be required to work, often for very little pay. People disagree about how much the exception is to blame for this. Since 2018, voters in several states have removed similar exceptions from their own state constitutions, and members of Congress have proposed an amendment to remove it from the Thirteenth Amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868): citizenship, due process, and equal protection

In plain words: This one long section does four things.

• Citizenship. Anyone born in the United States, or naturalized here, is a citizen of the United States and of the state where they live. (To be "naturalized" is to become a citizen after being born a citizen of another country.) This overturned the Dred Scott decision. In 1898, in a case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen by birth under this clause.
• Privileges or immunities. A state may not take away the rights that come with being a citizen of the United States. ("Abridge" means cut short or reduce.)
• Due process. A state may not take anyone's life, liberty, or property without fair legal procedures. The Fifth Amendment already said this to the national government. Now it applied to the states too.
• Equal protection. A state must treat every person equally under the law. Notice that the due process and equal protection clauses say "any person," not "any citizen." They protect everyone within a state's jurisdiction, including people who are not citizens.

Why it happened. Slavery was over, but the black codes showed that Southern states meant to keep freed people in a condition close to slavery. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to protect them, and then wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to make sure those protections could not be undone by a later Congress or struck down by a court.

Other sections. Section 2 ended the counting of enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. From then on, every person in a state was counted when seats in the House were divided up. Section 2 also used the word "male" in describing voters, the first time that word appeared in the Constitution. Women's rights leaders who had fought against slavery were bitterly disappointed.

Why it matters so much today. The Fourteenth Amendment is the part of the Constitution that courts rely on more than any other. Over the twentieth century, the Supreme Court used its due process clause to apply most of the Bill of Rights to state governments, not only to the national government. This process is called incorporation. And the equal protection clause is the basis for many of the most important civil rights decisions, including Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

The Fifteenth Amendment (1870): the vote for Black men

In plain words: Neither the national government nor any state may stop a citizen from voting because of his race, his color, or because he was once enslaved. ("Previous condition of servitude" means having been enslaved in the past.) It did not cover women, so in practice it gave the vote to Black men.

Why it happened. Congress and many Republicans believed that freed people could protect their own rights only if they could vote. During Reconstruction, Black men voted in large numbers, and more than a thousand Black men were elected to public office in the South, including members of Congress.

How these promises were undermined

Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the national government withdrew the last federal troops from the South. Over the following decades, Southern state governments found ways around the new amendments. They used:

• Poll taxes: a fee a person had to pay in order to vote. Many poor people, Black and white, could not afford it.
• Literacy tests: reading tests that a person had to pass in order to register to vote. The officials who gave the tests were white, and they could pass white applicants and fail Black applicants however well they read.
• Violence and threats by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan against Black people who tried to vote.
• Jim Crow laws: state and local laws that kept Black and white people separate in schools, trains, restaurants, hospitals, and almost every other public place. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court approved this system, ruling that "separate but equal" facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. The facilities for Black people were almost never equal.

By the early 1900s, most Black citizens in the Deep South could not vote at all, though the Fifteenth Amendment was still in the Constitution.

How they were enforced, at last

It took nearly a century of organizing, lawsuits, marches, and sacrifice by the civil rights movement before the national government enforced these amendments.

• 1954: In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that separate public schools for Black and white children violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This overturned "separate but equal" in public schools.
• 1964: The Civil Rights Act banned discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in jobs and in public places such as hotels and restaurants.
• 1965: The Voting Rights Act suspended literacy tests in the places that had used them to block Black voters, and sent federal officials to register voters there. Within a few years, the number of Black voters registered in the South rose sharply.

Widening the vote

The original Constitution did not say who could vote. It left that to the states, and in 1789 most states allowed only white men who owned property or paid taxes. Over the next two centuries, five amendments besides the Fifteenth widened the vote or gave voters more power. The word for the right to vote is suffrage.

The Fifteenth Amendment (1870), explained in Part 4, was the first. It forbids denying the vote because of race, color, or having once been enslaved.

The Seventeenth Amendment (1913): voters choose their senators

In plain words: The voters of each state elect their two senators directly. ("Thereof" here means of that state.)

Why it happened. Under the original Constitution, senators were chosen by state legislatures, not by the voters. Some legislatures argued for months without agreeing, and Senate seats stayed empty. There were also charges that wealthy men had won their seats by bribing legislators. In the early 1900s, a reform movement called the Progressive movement worked to make government more answerable to ordinary voters, and direct election of senators was one of its goals.

The Nineteenth Amendment (1920): women's suffrage

In plain words: No government in the United States may stop a citizen from voting because she is a woman.

Why it happened. Women had demanded the vote since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments left them out. For the next fifty years, women organized, gave speeches, marched, and won the vote state by state, starting in the West, where Wyoming gave women the vote in 1869 while it was still a territory. During World War I, some suffragists picketed outside the White House and were jailed. Congress proposed the amendment in 1919. In August 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it, by a single vote in its legislature, and the amendment became part of the Constitution.

The Nineteenth Amendment did not reach all women equally. Many Black women in the South were still kept from voting by the same poll taxes and literacy tests used against Black men, until the 1960s. Many Native American women and Asian immigrant women could not vote because the law did not allow them to be citizens.

The Twenty-third Amendment (1961): a vote for president in Washington, D.C.

The Twenty-third Amendment gives the District of Columbia electors in the Electoral College. It gets as many electors as it would have if it were a state, but no more than the state with the smallest population. Today that is three.

Why it happened. Washington, D.C., is the nation's capital. It is not a state, and the Electoral College was made up only of electors from states. So the hundreds of thousands of Americans who lived there could not vote for president at all. They first voted for president in 1964. People who live in D.C. still have no member of Congress who can vote on whether a bill becomes law.

The Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964): no poll tax in federal elections

In plain words: No one can be made to pay a tax in order to vote for president, vice president, or members of Congress. (A primary is an election in which a party's voters choose its candidates.)

Why it happened. As Part 4 explained, Southern states had used poll taxes since the late 1800s to keep Black citizens and poor white citizens from voting. By 1964, five states still charged one. The amendment covers only elections for national offices. Two years later, in 1966, the Supreme Court ruled that poll taxes in state elections violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971): the vote at eighteen

In plain words: Citizens who are eighteen or older have the right to vote. Before this, most states set the voting age at twenty-one.

Why it happened. During the Vietnam War, young men could be drafted into the army at eighteen, but in most states they could not vote until twenty-one. People asked why someone old enough to be sent to war was not old enough to vote. In 1970 Congress passed a law lowering the voting age to eighteen, but the Supreme Court ruled that Congress could do this only for national elections, not for state ones. That would have meant keeping two separate lists of voters. To settle it, Congress proposed the amendment in March 1971, and the states ratified it by July 1971, in a little over three months. No amendment has been ratified faster.

Who could vote, and when

Notice that not every step was an amendment. Some of the biggest changes came from laws passed by Congress and from court decisions.

Money and the national government

The Sixteenth Amendment (1913): the income tax

In plain words: Congress may tax people's incomes, wherever the income comes from. It does not have to divide the tax among the states according to their population. ("Lay" a tax means to set it. "Apportionment" means dividing something up in shares. A "census" or "enumeration" is a count of the population.)

Why it happened. For most of the 1800s, the national government got most of its money from tariffs, which are taxes on goods brought in from other countries. Tariffs raise the prices of everyday goods, so they fall heavily on working people, who spend most of what they earn. Reformers wanted a tax that would take more from people with large incomes. Congress passed an income tax in 1894, but in 1895 the Supreme Court struck it down. The Court said it was a kind of tax that the original Constitution required to be divided among the states by population, which an income tax could not practically be. The Sixteenth Amendment removed that obstacle.

At first the income tax reached only people with high incomes. It grew much larger during the two world wars, and during World War II the government began taking the tax directly out of workers' paychecks, a practice called withholding. Today the income tax is the national government's largest source of money.

Prohibition, and the only repeal

Two amendments go together. The first banned alcohol across the country. The second, fourteen years later, undid the first. To repeal a law means to cancel it. The Twenty-first Amendment is the only amendment that repeals another amendment.

The Eighteenth Amendment (1919): Prohibition

In plain words: Starting one year after this amendment is ratified, it is illegal to make, sell, or transport alcoholic drinks in the United States, or to bring them into or send them out of the country. ("Intoxicating liquors" means alcoholic drinks.) The ban was called Prohibition, and it took effect in January 1920.

Why it happened. For decades, a movement called the temperance movement had campaigned against alcohol. Its supporters, many of them women and church members, blamed drinking for poverty, violence in the home, and men spending their wages in saloons. Groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League built strong political organizations, and by 1917 many states had already banned alcohol on their own.

What happened. Many people kept drinking. They bought alcohol from people who made or smuggled it illegally, called bootleggers, and drank it in hidden bars called speakeasies. Criminal gangs grew rich supplying it, and violence between gangs grew. The government also lost the tax money that legal alcohol had brought in. When the Great Depression began in 1929, many people argued that legal alcohol would bring back jobs and tax money.

The Twenty-first Amendment (1933): the end of Prohibition

In plain words: The Eighteenth Amendment is canceled. National Prohibition is over. Section 2 of the amendment lets each state keep its own laws about alcohol, so a state, or a county within a state, can still ban it.

Why it was ratified by conventions. This is the only amendment that Congress sent to state conventions instead of state legislatures. Supporters of repeal believed many state legislators were still loyal to the temperance groups. Special conventions, with delegates elected by the voters for this one purpose, were expected to follow the voters' wishes more closely. The amendment was ratified in December 1933, less than a year after Congress proposed it.

All twenty-seven in one table

Here are all the amendments in number order, with the year each was ratified.

Words to know

Amendment

A formal change or addition to a document. The Constitution has twenty-seven.

Article V

The part of the Constitution that explains how it can be amended.

Propose

To formally put forward a change for approval. Congress proposes an amendment by a two-thirds vote in each house.

Ratify

To formally approve. An amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

Convention

A meeting of representatives gathered for a special purpose, such as proposing or ratifying an amendment.

Repeal

To cancel a law. The Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth.

Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments, ratified in 1791.

Involuntary servitude

Being forced to work for someone against your will.

Naturalized

Having become a citizen after being born a citizen of another country.

Due process

Fair legal procedures that the government must follow before taking a person's life, liberty, or property.

Equal protection

The requirement that a state treat every person equally under the law.

Black codes

Laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War to control and limit freed Black people.

Jim Crow laws

State and local laws, mostly in the South, that kept Black and white people separate in public places, from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

Suffrage

The right to vote.

Poll tax

A fee a person had to pay in order to vote. Banned in national elections by the Twenty-fourth Amendment.

Literacy test

A reading test once required before a person could register to vote, used unfairly to keep Black citizens from voting.

Electoral College

The group of electors, chosen by each state and by Washington, D.C., who formally elect the president and vice president.

Lame duck

An official serving out the last part of a term after someone else has been chosen to replace him or her.

Succession

The order in which one person takes over an office from another. The Twenty-fifth Amendment deals with presidential succession.

Income tax

A tax on the money people earn. Allowed by the Sixteenth Amendment.

Tariff

A tax on goods brought in from other countries.

Prohibition

The national ban on alcoholic drinks from 1920 to 1933, under the Eighteenth Amendment.