People Vote On Constitution Amendments example essay topic

560 words
Article V in the U.S. Constitution discusses what is needed bring about an amendment to the constitution. According to Article V, two thirds of both houses or two thirds of the states have to be in agreement to call a convention for the amendment of the constitution. This process could lead to some problems such as blocking the will of the majority of the people. One solution that has been suggested is to amend the constitution to a vote of the people. Some problems with this are that people sometimes are not really informed, they are guided by greed, and not all states will be represented equally. By letting the people vote on constitution amendments there will be many problems that come up.

One of them is that most people are not really politically informed. Even if they are politically active they might not necessarily know what the amendment is about. They could easily be misled by advertisements or the thoughts of other people so when they make their decision to vote, it will not be very legitimate. The fact that people can choose the constitutional amendments can also be pretty scary. If that was the case the constitution right now would have a lot of little unintelligent amendments. For example if people were to look at state constitutions they would find that there are rules such as no smoking underwater, no riding mules on Sunday, etc.

These amendments to state constitutions are there because the people were the ones that voted for them. When the people voted they probably thought they were making the right decision but now that they look back at it they realize how dumb it really was. Another problem is that people are guided by greed and self interest. With this in mind people might not really always choose what is good for the people.

They " ll vote according to what is good for their faction. So if this were too happen a lot of people would be underrepresented such as the minorities and the constitution would all be for the rest of the people and the minorities would not really have much say. Finally, by letting the people vote all states would not be represented equally and the little states will suffer a lot. A constitutional amendment is really important and states should have the same amount of representation no matter what population they have. There really would not be any problems of under representation because every state will have an equal voice and people can get together and vote for certain things that will benefit them and their state.

In conclusion, Article V in the constitution should be left just as it is and not amend it to a vote of the people for the reasons just mentioned. Also by leaving it as it is, it will be very hard to change which is a good thing because if the constitution, which is our base ground, constantly changed then maybe our government would not be as good and as stable as it is right now. The framers thought about all the different problems that could arise in the future and they did an incredible job at writing the constitution.