The amendments to the Constitution

- Admenments to the Constitution are first proposed by a two-thirds vote of

both houses of Congress.

- Since the addition of the Bill of Rights in 1971, the Constitution has been
changed only 17 times and once of those amendments simply canceled another.

-The most significant portion of the Constitution is the Bill of Rights, the first 10
amendments to the Constitution. The first of these assures freedom of
religion,speech,the press and the right to compain to and about the government.
- Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said that, for a democracy to work,
people must be allowed to express new, unsual, and unpopular ideas. After all,
democracy itself was a new and strange idea in the eighteenth century, and it still is
in many parts of the world.

-Freedom of religion means that each person can belong( or not belong) to any
religious group.Religious freedom also means that neither the federal
government nor any state government can encourage or prevent the practice of
religion.

- The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments protect people suspected or
accused of crimes. Government cannot arrest people or search them, their
property, or their homes without some reason to believe that they have
committed a crime.

-The most important of the remaining is the Fourteenth, which is grew out of the
Civil War. It was passed to protect former slaves from state laws that
discriminated against them.

- The Bill of Rights did not protect people from state action, but only from
federal action. The Fourteenth Amendments has been interpreted by the
Supreme Court to apply almost all of the provisions in the Bill of Rights to the
individual states. The Fourteenth Amendment is one of the most valuable
protections that people living in the U.S have.
The Federal System
-The United States is organized as a federal system. This means that the power to
govern is divided between the national( federal) goverment. Located in
Washington D.C, and the state governments.

- Most state governments are quite similar in structure to the national

government. Each is headed by an elected executive called a governor. The
legislative branchmay be called a state legislature or general assembly.

- Most of the state legislatures also have two houses.States are divided into smaller
govermental units such as countries, cities,towns, and villages.

- Since the Constitution was written , this nation has changed from the rural and
agricultural society -> a highly industrialized, urban society.

- The population has grown from less than 4 million to ablout 275 million.

- The american experiment in democracy has proved conclusively that government

“ of the people, by the people , for the people” can function effectively for the
good of its citizens.