"Far from being rigid, the US constitution is remarkably flexible." Discuss.

The case that the US constitution is rigid is a strong one. To begin with, the process of passing amendments to the document can be long and arduous as there are only two methods by which any change can be approved. An amendment must either be proposed by a member of Congress and approved by a two thirds majority in both Houses of Congress before receiving the backing of two thirds of the state legislatures, or it must be put forward at a Convention of all the states before then being ratified through the same process as the first method of change. This makes passing amendments very difficult, as is highlighted by the fact that over the course of America’s 240 year-long history only 27 of over a thousand proposed amendments have been approved, with ideas such as term limits for members of Congress failing to garner enough support. At the same time, the process is particularly time consuming, with the most recent Amendment adopted, the XXVII, taking 203 years to pass after it was submitted to the states for ratification in 1789 and only adopted in 1992. As such it seems clear that the US Constitution is a rigid document that is by no means flexible in the face of changing attitudes.

In truth though, the Constitution is, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jrn, an “organic living” document as a consequence of the inbuilt mechanisms within it that allow it to adapt to changing times. This is perhaps most vividly illustrated by the passage of the XVI Amendment in 1913 which gave the government “the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes” after the Supreme Court had previously ruled in 1895 in Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Company that income taxes were unconstitutional. The flexibility of the Constitution is also displayed by the manner in which the US Supreme Court, through the Judicial review principle that allows it to strike down legislation as was established in Marbury v. Madison (1803), ensures that all laws passed in the US fit within the parameters set down in the document. For instance, in United States v. Windsor (2013), the court ruled that denying marriage benefits to same sex couples that heterosexual couples were entitled to was unlawful, despite this issue not being mentioned in the Constitution and the X Amendment suggesting such areas of policy would be the preserve of the states. Considering evidence such as this, it seems clear that the US Constitution is by no means rigid, and simply forces any proposed changes to be scrutinised in depth and have widespread support before they can be made; something that when one is altering the fundamental legal foundations of a nation is surely generally desirable.