A lot of people (across the political spectrum) say they want constitutional amendments, for elections, money in politics, term limits, rights, you name it. That instinct isn’t “wrong.” But it’s important to understand what an amendment actually requires, because it is intentionally designed to be difficult.
The U.S. Constitution is amended through Article V, and the process is fundamentally different from passing a normal law.
Step 1: Propose an amendment (two possible routes)
Route A: Congress proposes it
Congress can propose an amendment when two-thirds of both the House and the Senate vote to do so.
In practical terms, with full membership, that is commonly described as:
• 67 Senators (2/3 of 100), and
• 290 House members (2/3 of 435),
though in practice Congress counts based on votes with a quorum present. (The key takeaway is: it requires a supermajority in both chambers.)
Important detail: The President does not sign a constitutional amendment proposal, and cannot veto it, because the President has no constitutional role in the amendment process.
Route B: States force Congress to call a convention
If the legislatures of two-thirds of the states apply for it (currently 34 states), Congress “shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments.”
Two critical points:
• This is a convention to propose, not to adopt. Ratification still comes later.
• None of the 27 ratified amendments have ever been proposed via an Article V convention. Every ratified amendment has been proposed by Congress.
Step 2: Ratify the proposed amendment (also two possible routes)
Once proposed (by Congress or a convention), the amendment becomes part of the Constitution only when three-fourths of the states ratify it, currently 38 states.
Congress chooses which of these two ratification methods applies:
Method 1: Ratification by state legislatures
This is the standard approach used for almost every amendment. Article V explicitly allows ratification by the “Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.”
Method 2: Ratification by state conventions
Congress can instead require special state ratifying conventions.
This has been used only once in U.S. history: the 21st Amendment (repealing Prohibition) was ratified by state conventions rather than state legislatures.
Step 3: Certification and publication
Once the required number of states ratify, the amendment is formally recognized and published through federal procedures administered by the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register. Certification records ratification; it is not another constitutional approval vote.
Built-in constraints most people never hear about
1) The “equal suffrage” limitation (a hard constitutional guardrail)
Article V includes a permanent constraint: no state can be deprived of its equal representation in the Senate without that state’s consent.
2) Congress can set a time limit (commonly done)
Article V doesn’t require deadlines, but Congress has often included them in the proposing resolution (commonly seven years).
Why amendments feel “impossible” in modern politics
Here’s the reality: amendments are designed to require broad, durable, cross-faction consensus, not 51% in a polarized moment.
A few grounding facts help:
• Congress has proposed 33 amendments since 1789; 27 were ratified.
• The most recent ratified amendment (the 27th) took effect in 1992, more than two centuries after it was first proposed.
• No amendment has ever come from an Article V convention.
So if people want reforms that are constitutional, the political math is simple:
• You need something big enough that it can win a two‑thirds coalition in Congress and spread across 38 states, or
• You need a national state‑legislature coalition to force a convention and then still win 38 states.
That is why, in practice, most change happens through:
• ordinary legislation,
• state law,
• executive actions,
• and court interpretation, because those pathways don’t require supermajorities in 38 states.
The punchline for your town hall
If a room full of people says, “We need a constitutional amendment,” a fair follow-up question is:
What exactly is the text and can we realistically build a coalition large enough to reach 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of states?
If the answer is “not even close,” then the practical next step isn’t cynicism, it’s strategy:
• write reforms that can pass as legislation now,
• build bipartisan durability,
• and make amendments the last step, not the first.
