Constitutional Bloopers

P.S. Huff

Some fun facts about the Constitution:

1. It is easier to remove a president from office than it is to overturn a presidential veto. The latter takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress; the former takes only a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate.

2. If the vice president is impeached, he is entitled to preside over his own trial in the Senate. (If, on the other hand, the president is impeached, the chief justice presides.)

3. The president has plenary power to pardon himself for federal crimes (though he cannot immunize himself against impeachment).

4. Article IV, §3, cl. 1 reads: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress." Taken at face value, this would seem to prevent the formation of a new state even within the (prior) geographic boundaries of a consenting state.

5. The First Amendment begins "Congress shall make no law . . . ." Yet the Constitution makes treaties as well as statutes "the supreme Law of the Land."

6. The Eighth Amendment forbids "excessive" fines, but it prohibits only "cruel and unusual" punishments.

7. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, whenever the right to vote in elections to certain offices is

denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The Nineteenth Amendment forbids sex discrimination in the franchise, but does nothing (by its terms) to broaden this rule. Neither does the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which forbids age discrimination in the franchise among those eighteen and up.

Well, have I missed anything?