15 Changes In The 19th Century

The sight of numbers renders a sensation that words generally don’t. They utterly stump many, yet make complete sense to others. However, for all the commotion they cause, they possess a fatal weakness; they’re meaningless without context. One prominent quantity in the US Constitution is 27. Indeed, there have been 27 total amendments to the American Constitution, but take out the original ten, which was part of the Bill of Rights, and the fact that two of them were used to adjust the drinking age, and you have 15 changes to the law after the Constitution was first drafted in 1789. Now, 15 can represent many different outcomes, given the contexts. If someone claims that the Giants scored 15 touchdowns, that’s a new record in the realm of football, but most likely an exaggeration given their recent performances. If a friend of mine tells me that he scored a 15 out of 100 on his Chemistry final, it’s laughable, but also most likely exaggerated. 15 changes to the Constitution could possibly be among those numbers. According to “constitutionfacts.com” There have been 11,372 proposed amendments since 1789. 0.13% of the proposed amendments have been passed. Suddenly, a 15% on a Chemistry final doesn’t sound so laughable. …show more content…
The 11,372 that made it as official ideas are a select group in an even larger pool of verbal propositions that never made it out. It’s clear that our Founding Fathers did not want a hair of doubt in the mind of any state legislator or senator when the law was going to be corrected, even if it did come at the cost of 99.87% of the propositions not being passed. Essentially, a slow process requiring the miraculous phenomenon known as “bipartisan support” could be why next to absolutely nothing gets passed. It could seem that “the living document” aspect has its