Constitution of Tennessee - Amendments

Amendments

The record length of time for going unamended ended in 1953. In 1952 the legislature called for a convention and the voters approved it. They then approved the recommended amendments. The most noticeable change wrought in the 1953 amendments was a lengthening of the governor's term from two to four years, with the added provision that no governor could succeed himself. (Until subsequently amended again, in 1978, the effect of this provision was to establish what critics derisively called "leapfrog government".) Another provision allowed for the consolidation of a county government with the government of a county's principal city in the four largest counties.

The 1953 convention established precedents which proved useful in the future. Since no one who served in the 1870 convention writing the current constitution was still alive by this point, many things had to be decided, such as what rules the convention would function under temporarily until its was organized and adopted its own permanent rules, how a chair was to be elected, and other administrative matters. Another administrative provision determined that the Tennessee State Constitution was to be compiled in a manner similar to statutory law and not in the manner of the federal constitution. This means that amendments actually replace the language that they alter in the document and that in future publications the amendments are integrated into the text rather than appended to it as "Amendment I", "Amendment II", etc. The effect of this is that one reading the text of the constitution will, absent a strong historical background, sometimes be confused as to which provisions are those of the original document and which are the result of later amendment, although some amendments declare themselves to be such within the text of their provisions. This practice does prevent a reader of the current constitution from being confused by encountering obsolete provisions which have since been changed and not reading on to the end of the document to establish that fact, which is sometimes done to the federal constitution by persons who wish to obscure its current provisions, such as those who assert that the document "even now refers to blacks as only three-fifths of a person", a provision which has not applied since the American Civil War but is still in the text of the early part of the document, the amendment deleting this provision not being encountered until much later.

Further amendments were proposed and subsequently adopted at conventions held in 1959 and 1965. Among the most notable of these allowed for the establishment of home rule by counties which chose to adopt a charter allowing them to function in many ways similar to municipalities. They also allowed legislators to receive a salary over and above expense money, and extended the terms of state senators from two years to four, done in such a way so that half of its membership is elected every two years. Another important change was that the frequency of scheduled sessions of the legislature (and hence the budget cycle) was altered from biennial to annual, though the General Assembly is still limited to a total of fifteen organizational days and ninety legislative days every two years; sessions extending beyond this (and special sessions extending beyond twenty legislative days) result in the legislature being unable to continue to receive its expense per diem. The poll tax provisions, already rendered moot by the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, were removed. The 1971 convention, dominated by longtime Tennessee politician Clifford Allen, was limited to the establishment of a new system of property tax assessments.