Talk:Constitution of the United States

I edited the section on impeachment and added a comment to it a disputed section. A senator may have been expelled but not impeached. That raises a question as to the accuracy of the claim that there were 16 impeachments (now 15). Guanaco

Re: RickK According to Article 1, Section 5, it requires a two-thirds vote to "expel" a member of either house of Congress. That vote is taken within that house. Since expulsion and impeachment are two different things, I removed the reference to the impeachment of a senator. See [1]. The number of impeached officials as shown in the edited paragraph is what is disputed. Since part of it has already been proven to be incorrect, it is risky to assume that the rest will be. Guanaco 05:11, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

On the description of the 13th amendment:

It appears to me that the text "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" can equally well be taken to refer to "slavery and involuntary servitude" and to "involuntary servitude" alone. Historically this exception appears to have been used in order to allow prison work, which surely falls under the rubric of "involuntary servitude" rather than slavery. Moreover, the Supreme Court has established many times that the amendment "abolishes slavery" in no uncertain terms. Some of the quotes are here: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/constitution/amdt13.html Therefore, I think it justified to simply say that the amendment abolishes slavery.

Comments? --AV

I believe AV's assesment is totally correct. --Daniel C. Boyer

I hadn't thought of the other interpretation. Too bad they didn't have wikipedians around to say "but hey, it could have this second unintended meaning too." --KQ

I would like to see a list of failed ammendments -- proposed ammendments which were proposed by Congress but never recieved the requisite number of ratifications from the states. The second extra ammendment contained in the Bill of Rights would be one important one (I keep on hearing it mentioned, but never what it said). Another quite important one would be the Equal Rights Ammendment. I'd probably forget about ammendments which failed at the stage of Congress though -- simply because there are thousands of them (ammendments to abolish the electoral college, to reinstitute official prayers in public schools, etc.) -- SJK

Failed ammendments - http://www.usconstitution.net/constam.html#process

http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/usconst/notamend.html

I note that Constitution of Canada has gone on the chopping block due to it being just a source text ported over to Wikipedia. I agree with this verdict, I've campaigned vociferously against source texts myself in other places. However, as a good red-blooded Canadian, I feel it is my duty to put United States Constitution up for the same treatment. Fair's fair, after all. :) Since this page gets linked to more frequently, though, I don't want to just go in and clear out great swaths without warning or consultation. Anyone have any comments or suggestions before I convert the US constitution to external links? Bryan Derksen, Friday, June 14, 2002

Go for it. Vicki Rosenzweig, Saturday, June 22, 2002

I strongly disagree. If it's put into the Wiki in such a way that context can be added, then it's a good thing to have the source text as well (note, for example, the Twelfth Amendment article). I also think the Canadian Constitution should be in Wikipedia as well. Any decent encyclopedia includes the full text of at least the U.S Constitution. RobLa, Saturday, June 22, 2002

The problem--other than the imbalance of chopping the Canadian constitution but keeping the US--is that *everything* here can be edited. That makes the Wikipedia a poor location for any source text--someone looking up the text of the US constitution needs to know that they're going to see the precise document, not something someone fiddled with because the commas in the Second Amendment don't work by 21st century standards, or something with a line missing because someone got careless. Or, worse, someone decided they disagreed with the people who wrote the thing, and took it on themselves to leave here what they think our constitution should be. Vicki Rosenzweig, Saturday, June 22, 2002

I also concur -- source texts like these are useless unless the reader can be reasonably sure that what is on the screen is actually what the original authors wrote. Small selections that are commented on are fine entire documents are most certainly not appropriate -- this is especially important with legal documents. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that tollerates some almanac-type list information, it is not a library. Rob, please see what wikipedia is not number 12 and also some comments at talk:Macbeth. --maveric149

Cunctator has developed some ideas on separate project to handle the wikification of source texts, and I added a few thoughts. If anyone's interested, check out m:Project Sourceberg (his name, not mine ;-) over at the meta. --Stephen Gilbert

No need for to go through the trouble of having a separate project. What is needed is separate namespace that has special default properties -- such as only being able to be edited by "trusted hand" or greater users and be able to be called upon by other articles with the following or similar syntax: [[source:Origin of Species/Chapter 1{1-15}] (where "1-15" are line numbers) and also serve as stand-alone wikified texts. Of course, there would have to be strongly enforced policies to only correct OCR errors and to wikify the text. See my idea at wikipedia:feature requests. --maveric149

Personaly, I (and others, based on comments on the Sourceberg page) don't think that primary sources are well suited for permanent wiki life. Once they are corrected and linked to articles, there's not need to keep them in an editable state. Also, I think it's important to for the Wikipedia project to remain focused on producing encyclopedia articles. Inputing, correcting, and linking source texts, while very interesting and useful, doesn't fall under that mandate. I think, if enough people are interested, that the wikification of sources is best left to a closely related but separate sister project. --Stephen Gilbert

I've redirected all the original-text pages here, except for United States Constitution/Article One, which is protected. Can any sysop help me with redirect that to this page? jheijmans, Friday, July 19, 2002

In the process of making this (IMHO, ill-advised) change, some original explanatory text from the 12th amendement article was removed. Additionally, links are being redirected to this general, and less useful page. For example, if someone is specifically interested in the 12th amendment, they are now redirected to the U.S. Constitution page, whereas before, they actually got the 12th amendment and historical context. sigh.

Here's the text, in hopes that someone figures out how to integrate it.

This amendment was motivated by the Presidential election of 1800. Prior to ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, votes for President and Vice President were not listed on separate ballots. Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr tied in the number of electoral votes received, neither receiving a majority of votes. The House of Representatives voted over thirty times to a tie vote before a deal was struck and Jefferson was elected.

The amendment itself was a subject of a constitutional dilemma. On June 15, 1804, the amendment received the constitutionally-required ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures when New Hampshire ratified the amendment. However, on June 20, the Governor of the state vetoed the amendment. Since the Constitution doesn't mention anything about governors, it's questionable whether their veto matters. The issues was resolved when Tennessee ratified the amendment on July 27, 1804.

-- RobLa July 20, 2002

Cunctator, please look at What wikipedia is not # 12:

"Mere collections of public domain or other source material; such as entire books, original historical documents, letters, laws, proclamations (...)"

Please restore the previous status. Jeronimo 11:19 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

jheijmans, the amendments are of enough historical signicance to have their own pages. Whether or not the source text is quoted on them is less of a concern (they are short enough that it doesn't do harm), but they all have histories associated with them. As you can see from this long talk thread, I was pretty upset to see the amendments get redirected, and was quite relieved to see Cunctator's action. -- RobLa

Maybe the US constitution is interesting enough for an encyclopedia article, but who guarantees the page is not edited here at Wikipedia? Just because the constitution is not copyrighted, there's no need to paste it in. Instead, it would be far more interesting to read about the meaning of the constitution to the country, the people, the world; its history and evolution.

I will restore the redirect version when I have the time for it. Jeronimo 11:19 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

You aren't getting it, are you? There is no justification for having an article about the 12th amendment redirect back to a general page about the constitution. None. This isn't about having source text or not, it's about whether or not the amendments deserve separate articles. -- RobLa

How about if I remove the text from each amendment page, leaving a link to http://www.archives.gov/exhibit_hall/charters_of_freedom/constitution/constitution_transcription.html and a stub describing the basic gist of the amendment's content? I don't know a lot about the history of the various amendments, and their detailed implementation throughout history, so that would be left to future editors to flesh out. Bryan Derksen 16:36 Aug 10, 2002 (PDT)

That sounds good to me Bryan. The amendments shouldn't be in an editable state and we accomplish nothing by being yet another mirror for them. We are making an encyclopedia here. --mav

That's better. As I said before, my biggest beef was with nuking the separate articles. That said, I think it's humorous that people think hyperlinks to external sites are more reliable than source text. Other websites change their URL structure all of the time. Heck, the recent change from nara.gov to archives.gov broke all of the constitution links. I think it's blind orthodoxy to have a black and white policy prohibiting source text. -- RobLa

Hey, I want the text there. It's not like it's a burden, and it's very useful. And I dare you to find a paper encyclopedia that doesn't include any excerpts from major documents. --The Cunctator

Excerpts are fine. At issue here is if the entire text should be in here --- which is a public editable website. The text is worthless without some reasonable assurance that it is exactly the same as the original. Therefore the stubs and external links. --mav

This sort of thing has been discussed lots of times in the past, see WikiBiblion and associated talk for example. Obviously, I agree with Maveric here. Bryan Derksen

Obviously I agree with RobLa here. There's plenty of a reasonable assurance that the text is exactly the same as the original. Find the differences. It's not like someone can sneak in changes. --The Cunctator

Looks like the Cunctator is willing to fight this edit war longer than I intend to stay up tonight. But unless someone comes up with some good reason for this particular source text to be left in Wikipedia while all the others are being removed, I'll resume work on it again later. Bryan Derksen

Same here. Let him have it for another day. Perhaps the extra time will give him some time to cool off. I have more interesting things to do right now than fight an edit war. --mav

So do I.==The Cunctator

I dont know why you just don't leave it the way it is. its fine why change soemthing that is fine. its a waste of time. just leave it the way it is. In my persanol opinion wikipedia should be more tnhan an encyclpedia it should contain more facts and bits and bobs than any other encyclopedia, factfinder ever contained. I also thing there should be a dictionary section. Maybe links like this for defenitions: WikiDictionary\abnormal.

But no one ever likes my opinons or idea so its prob a wate of my time wrting this . - fonzy.

Cunctator and RobLa: an encyclopedia is to look up information ABOUT various subjects. If I look up the Bible, I don't expect to find a verbatim copy of the text there. I want to know what signficance the book has, who wrote it, why it is so important. Such a discussion may use some quotes from the book itself, though they would need to be explained. If I would simply get the full text instead, I'd probably go away to some other encyclopedia instead. The same for the (US) constitution. If I wanted to read the full text, I'd probably search for it specifically and not bother to look it up in an encyclopedia anyway. In stead, I expect to find something about the history, the significance etc. of the US constitution. And yes, even the individual articles or amendments may be of interest (f.e. the gun-bearing amendment). And in some cases, if the text is short, that could even include a full copy of the text while remaining interesting, such as the Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan article. So, if you have something to write about the constitution, please do, but do a little more than just the plain text. Jeronimo 12:29 Aug 11, 2002 (PDT)

Some of the current amendment articles are now actually quite good, such asUnited States Constitution/Amendment Twelve. However, I think we should get rid of the subpages. However, there are some options for the new name, and I don't know which one is the best:

Any suggestions? Jeronimo

The more famous ammendments should simply be at First Amendment, Twelfth Amendment and the like, unless there is any need to disambiguate, in which case I'd go with the third format above: Twelfth Amendment of the United States Consitution. (I came here just to say that the subpages should be renamed, so I'm glad someone's already raised it :) -- Sam

Of doesn't sound right to me. I vote for Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Tokerboy

IMO option 3 is best for all. "First Amendment" and other famous ones, could redirect to the longer titles. But each one should be named using the same convention in order to reduce confusion lest somebody erroneously links to a not-so-famous Amendment via the shortened syntax. --mav

I agree "to" is even better. --mav

Should much of this historical information be moved to Constitutional Convention (United States)? -- Zoe

An odd question... is the text of the U.S. Constitution copyrighted? --Dante Alighieri 01:09 17 Jul 2003 (UTC)

No. The original text is out of copyright and any modifications since have been work by the US federal goverment and thus are in the public domain. --mav

Now that Wikipedia supports tables of contents for the headers within articles, I'm somewhat dubious about the merits of splitting the article arbitrarily in two like this. Is there any reason why stuff is over in United States Constitution:Part 2 aside from simply making the individual pages shorter? If not, I'm going to splice them back together. If this page is to be broken up it should be broken up in a more meaningful manner. Bryan 05:57, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I completely agree. Making "part x" daughter articles is a brain dead way of making things appear to be a manageable size (sic like an encyclopedia article should be). It is much better to have a really big page and to work on creating real sub-topic articles by spinning off content, in stead of that. --mav 07:02, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Amendment articles?

It almost seems reasonable to made all of the Article X of the U.S. Constitution articles redirects to U.S. Constitution#Article X. The amendments are significant enough to be directly linkable, but I would say that it's pointless to discuss them outside the context of the document as a whole. -Smack 18:24, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Move?

Move to Constitution of the United States like all the other List of national constitutions? The article title already has it in this format. --Jia ng 12:37, 1 Jan 2004 (UTC)

The recent edits (see page history between 27 and 29 Feb 2004) about the difficulty amending the US Constitution are mildly interesting but despite several rounds of editing (including my own best efforts) were not presented in a NPOV way. The implied value judgement that it is "too hard" always came through. If someone wants to discuss the amendment process in more detail, I would recommend moving it into a completely new article instead. Rossami 01:29, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)\

I'll start that now. Meelar 01:39, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree with taking that section out of the lead, but after consideration, I decided to add a rephrased note in the "Amending the Constitution" section. See my changes for details. Also, a semi-related note--is "The Constitution owes its staying power to its simplicity and flexibility" really NPOV? To say nothing of "its basic provisions were so soundly conceived that..." Meelar 01:47, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I thought about that some as well. I came to the conclusion that those clauses just barely meet the NPOV rule because they are (to the best of my knowledge) universally held judgements among serious constitutional scholars. Rossami 13:24, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

New Intro

I think there actually is some controversy over this topic (beyond the borderline vandalism this article has been undergoing), so I rewrote the intro to more accurately reflect both sides. Comments? Meelar 21:13, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)