United States
As examples of inadmissible constitutional amendments, Article Five of the United States Constitution contains two entrenched clauses. One clause prohibited any constitutional amendment regarding the international slave trade. This clause expired in 1808. The other clause, still in effect, states that "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate". This has been interpreted to require unanimous ratification of any amendment altering the composition of the United States Senate.
However, the text of the clause would indicate that the size of the Senate could be changed by an ordinary amendment if each state continued to have equal representation. The clause does not appear to be self-entrenched; that is, it does not, by its express terms, forbid its own amendment or repeal. So it is possible that one could proceed by first repealing the clause and then abolishing equality in the Senate through a subsequent amendment .
The Corwin Amendment (1861), prohibiting a constitutional amendment with respect to slavery, might have become another entrenched clause had it become part of the U.S. Constitution.
Read more about this topic: Entrenched Clause
Famous quotes related to united states:
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The United States never lost a war or won a conference.”
—Will Rogers (1879–1935)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name.... We must be impartial in thought as well as in action ... a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)