Article Five Of The United States Constitution
Article Five of the United States Constitution describes the process whereby the Constitution may be altered. Altering the Constitution consists of proposing an amendment or amendments and subsequent ratification.
Amendments may be proposed by either :
- two-thirds of both houses of the United States Congress ; or
- by a national convention assembled at the request of the legislatures of at least two-thirds of the states.
To become part of the Constitution, amendments must then be ratified either by approval of :
- the legislatures of three-fourths of the states ; or
- state ratifying conventions held in three-fourths of the states.
Congress has discretion as to which method of ratification should be used.
Any amendment so ratified becomes a valid part of the Constitution, provided that no state "shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the senate," without its consent.
Read more about Article Five Of The United States Constitution: Proposal, Ratification, Rescinding A Ratification, Deadline Imposed On Ratification Process, Proposed, But Unratified, Constitutional Amendments
Famous quotes containing the words article, united, states and/or constitution:
“Nature’s law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packaged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.”
—William McKinley (1843–1901)
“The Federal Constitution has stood the test of more than a hundred years in supplying the powers that have been needed to make the Central Government as strong as it ought to be, and with this movement toward uniform legislation and agreements between the States I do not see why the Constitution may not serve our people always.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)