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The original text of the Constitution set a duration for the terms of federal elected officials, but not the specific dates on which those terms would begin or end. In September 1788, after the necessary nine states had ratified the Constitution, the Congress of the Confederation set March 4, 1789, as the date "for commencing proceedings" of ...
When originally submitted to the states, nine ratifications would have made this amendment part of the Constitution. That number rose to ten on May 29, 1790, when Rhode Island ratified the Constitution. It rose to eleven on March 4, 1791, when Vermont joined the Union. By the end of 1791, the amendment was only one state short of adoption.
Of course, laws must be fixed and clear so that people can understand and abide by them on a daily basis. However, if the Constitution is more than a set of laws but also provides guiding concepts, which will in turn provide the foundations for laws, the costs and benefits of such an entirely-fixed meaning are very different.
The U.S. Constitution was a federal one and was greatly influenced by the study of Magna Carta and other federations, both ancient and extant. The Due Process Clause of the Constitution was partly based on common law and on Magna Carta (1215), which had become a foundation of English liberty against arbitrary power wielded by a ruler.
On September 13, 1788, the Congress of the Confederation certified that the new Constitution had been ratified by more than enough states for it to go into effect. Congress fixed the city of New York as the temporary seat of the new government and set the dates for the election of representatives and presidential electors.
Allocation of seats by state, as percentage of overall number of representatives in the House, 1789–2020 census. United States congressional apportionment is the process [1] by which seats in the United States House of Representatives are distributed among the 50 states according to the most recent decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution.
Many, including Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, supported lifetime tenure for presidents, while others favored fixed terms. Virginia's George Mason denounced the life-tenure proposal as tantamount to elective monarchy. [4] An early draft of the U.S. Constitution provided that the president was restricted to one seven-year term. [5]
Constitution of the Year XII (First French Republic) Constitution of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1848. A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organization or other type of entity, and commonly determines how that entity is to be governed.