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Articles 5, 6, and 7

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During the Constitutional Convention, delegates from around the new United States of America came together to formulate a strong nation to replace the weak confederacy that emerged after the Revolutionary War. Article Five of said Constitution was written to give the country the ability to change as the world around it changed. Article Six was created to hold up the financial reputation of America by transferring debts, as well as sustain the standards set in earlier articles as the supreme law of the United States. Article Seven was created to streamline the process of ratifying the Constitution. 

Article Five spells out the process that the federal government has to go through in order to amend the Constitution. Either Congress can present an amendment by gathering two-thirds of both the House and the Senate to approve the amendment, or if the legislatures of two-thirds of the states come together to propose an amendment, Congress will call a convention and amendments will be proposed. Following this, three-fourths of state legislators must ratify the amendment. Congress could also decide to have the states call a convention purely to ratify an amendment. A final clause was tacked on to the end of this amendment stating that no amendment could be passed inhibiting the slave trade until 1808. Article Six transfers the debt and prior treaties from the national government under the Articles of Confederation to the new Constitution. It also states that the federal government (and therefore the Constitution) is the supreme authority in America. Finally, it specifies that oaths should be made by legislators and executives to the people of the United States instead of a religious test as a barrier to entry. Article Seven of the Constitution states that only nine states are required to ratify the Constitution for it to be the binding federal document, and it lists all 13 states and the order in which they will call a Convention to vote on the validity of the Constitution. 

An example of a complex ratification process is the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), an amendment to codify the equality of the sexes in law, was ratified by 30 states within the first year of its proposal but it met opposition after this 30-state benchmark over concerns that women would no longer be exempt from compulsory military service as well as other issues. There are other cases of discrepancy between federal and state power like some campaign finance laws and the legalization of marijuana in spite of the Controlled Substances Act.

During the initial creation of the country, the goal was as little central regulation as possible, but this turned out to be a weak way to organize the United States as many consequential regulations changed from state to state. The Constitution’s significance comes from the combination of general principles found in state Constitutions and rolled them into one document that set the federal government as the highest rule of law in the United States. Instead of changing the federal supremacy clause, the Constitution should clarify the Elasticity Clause or refine the Tenth Amendment to clarify specifically how elastic the powers of the federal government is or where state jurisdiction starts. 

Bibliography

Congress, The Federal Status of Marijuana and the Expanding Policy Gap with States, H.R. Doc., at 3 (Mar. 6, 2023). Accessed June 2, 2023. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12270.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Equal Rights Amendment.” Britannica. Last modified April 27, 2023. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Equal-Rights-Amendment.

Oyez. “Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee V. Federal Election Commission.” In Oyez. Last modified 2023. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.oyez.org/cases/1995/95-489.

Articles 5, 6, and 7

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Article V covers the legal process of Amending the Constitution. It was drafted in response to the hesitation of certain states to ratify the Constitution. When an amendment is proposed, ⅔ of both houses, the Senate, and the House of Representatives need to agree to an amendment to move to the next step. The amendment then goes to state legislatures and ¾ of all legislatures must ratify it within 7 years or it will lapse. Scholars disagree about whether a state can revoke their vote in favor of an amendment. Some scholars feel that states should not be allowed to take away their vote for an amendment as that power is not explicitly stated in Article V.

Opposing scholars do not see an issue as long as the state makes its decision within the 7 year limit. Article VI of the Constitution covers debts and supreme law. It states that all debts from the previous government under the Articles of Confederation are still valid under the new Constitution, and that all members of the three branches of the new government must take an oath of allegiance to the new Constitution. As a new nation, allyship and allegiance were important and this oath ensured that the government would stand with one another as a nation under the new Constitution.

This Article also states that federal law is more powerful than state law, and when in conflict federal law becomes the, “the supreme Law of the Land”. In McCulloch vs. Maryland (1819), the state of Maryland wanted to impose taxes on the Second Bank of the United States but the cashier of the Baltimore branch refused to pay. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that because the bank was a federally created and controlled institution, the state did not have the right to tax it. This is a clear example of the national supremacy clause, in a conflict of power between state and federal rights, the federal government has more power. Article VII covers the process of the ratification of the Constitution.

It states that in order to ratify the Constitution, 9 out of 13 states must agree to it. This article is a response to the Articles of Confederation which stated that all states were required for ratification. This provision created conflict between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Anti-Federalists pointed out that the new constitution was not supreme law yet, as it had not been ratified and therefore the process in the Articles of Confederation still stood. Federalists argued that because there had been so many violations of the Articles of Confederation they no longer stood as supreme law and that Article VII was now the guiding principle for constitutional ratification. Through the conflict and disagreement that these Articles faced, they prevailed by reshaping the Constitution to what it is today.