Quotes About Amendments

And, as you recall, last year, people were asking us, don't vote on the bill until you read every part of the bill. So, as a good attorney and as a good legislator, I think it's my responsibility to read the amendments.

This edition is based on Orwell's typescript of November 1948, amended according to his proof corrections and taking in a few readings that are deemed to be his from the American first edition.

As ordinary citizens, we don't spend much time reading about and thinking through the creation of new laws or amendments of old ones.

I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.

This principle—the need for democracies to protect the rights of minorities—was one of the reasons that the U.S. Constitution's first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added so quickly. (You don't need a Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the majority in a democracy, because the vote already does that.)

So profound were these changes that the amendments should be seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a "second founding," a "constitutional revolution," in the words of Republican leader Carl Schurz, that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.1

The beauty of our country is that when it was founded that they took some time to lay out civil liberties in the first 10 Amendments - the Bill of Rights. I'm a firm believer in those civil liberties and the ability to have your own opinion.

Last Monday a string of amendments were presented to the lower House these altogether respect personal liberty...

Fourth Amendment, which requires a judge-issued warrant for an arrest; the Fifth Amendment, which requires a grand jury indictment before a person is held for trial; and the Sixth Amendment, which says that a person can be imprisoned only after conviction by a jury based on proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

I have said that I am in favor of personhood as a concept. I am not taking a position on any of the state amendments, and I have said over and over again - and it has been reported over and over again - that I am not in favor of banning any common forms of birth control in Colorado or in the United States.

This has not been a legislative process worthy of the Senate. Members of the Judiciary Committee, as I just said, were implored to save their amendments for the floor. Then, when we got here, we were told no amendments could be accepted.

Rather than negotiating yet another continuing resolution at the last minute, the appropriations process should work as it was originally designed, with appropriations bills passing the House and the Senate and being signed into law by the president, after robust debate, with a process for amendments.

We see then, in the first years of the Constitution, that some of its provisions—even those paraded most flamboyantly (like the First Amendment)—might be treated lightly. Others (like the power to tax) would be powerfully enforced.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years. With the government failing to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, black men, women, and children decided to do that on their own.

The present Constitution, with a few alterations of a trifling nature, is just as good as we want; and if it is sustained on this land of Joseph, it will be done by us and our posterity.

The whole freedom-of-speech thing is great. But I don't think that our Founding Fathers predicted social media when they created all of these amendments and stuff.

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

Senator Walter George (D-GA) was proud of how states like his beloved Georgia were able to legally disfranchise millions of voters. "Why apologize or evade?" he asked. "We have been very careful to obey the letter of the Federal Constitution—but we have been very diligent in violating the spirit of such amendments and such statutes as would have a Negro to believe himself the equal of a white man."117

I think, from the broad political spectrum, not just the Freedom Caucus, I think there is a need for internal reform that is how we bring bills up, getting back to regular order, how we offer amendments or don't offer amendments.

After eavesdropping for a while, I began to realize that all my life I'd been a hypocrite. As a journalist I'd always supported the right to free speech, but been opposed to guns. However, by playing favorites with the amendments, it wasn't the founding fathers' vision of America I was fighting for—it was just my personal opinion.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

Corporations haven't limited their grasp to the First Amendment; pretty much any and virtually every amendment that could be used to further corporate interests has been fair game.

Monday night was chapter-meeting night in Greek town, and there was a reverent hush in the neighborhood. Decisions and rules and amendments to rules were being developed throughout the area, and it was like a grand corporation manufacturing a variety of brands, all tested, all ready to compete with one another.