An Amendment to the Constitution

An amendment to the Constitution is an improvement, a correction or a revision to the original content approved in 1788. To this date, 27 Amendments have been approved, six have been disapproved and thousands have been discussed. The Article V of the Constitution prescribes how an amendment can become a part of the Constitution. There are two ways, but only one has been used. All 27 Amendments have been ratified after two-thirds of the House and Senate approve the proposal and send it to the state for voting. After, three-fourths of the states must affirm the proposed Amendment. An Amendment made in the Constitution will become part of it and it is the modification done to what is already written in the Constitution. As the law or rule that was made in the Constitution cannot be removed, it can be allowed to undergo some alteration or modification. The rule can be modified and fixed later on.

The amendments were introduced by James Madison to the 1st United States Congress as a series of legislative articles. They were adopted by the House of Representatives on August 21, 1789, formally proposed by joint resolution of Congress on September 25, 1789, and came into effect as Constitutional Amendments on December 15, 1791, through the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States. While twelve amendments were passed by Congress, only ten were originally passed by the states. Of the remaining two, one was adopted as the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the other technically remains pending before the states.

When the Constitution was first written, many states feared that they were creating a very strong central government. So, in order to quite some of those fears the Bill of Rights was included. The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, is the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and its purpose is to protect certain rights and privileges of the people, which were not specifically written in the Constitution. For example, freedom of the press and speech which were so important to the Revolution was not included in the Constitution but they were included in the Bill of Rights. The Constitution did not sufficiently limit the power of the government in a way, so the Bill of Rights was adopted in order to put in place the institute's limits on their abilities to make laws.

The major effect of the Bill of Rights has been that is has served as an ideal to which the United States can aspire to. It is not right to say that in a way the Bill of Rights itself has protected American civil liberties. Rather, is better to express that the Bill of Rights has been something that America has worked on living up to. There have been many times in our history when the Bill of Rights has been trampled on, this happened as early as the Alien and Sedition Acts in the late 1700's and has continued up through at least the McCarthy Era of the 1950's. During this time, the Bill of Rights has not prevented the government from taking