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https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution

A history of edits to the US Constitution as it has been amended. Written in markdown to match original formatting.
https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution

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A history of edits to the US Constitution as it has been amended. Written in markdown to match original formatting.

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# Historical Edits of the USA Constitution



The United States of America's Constitution has seen many modifications over

the centuries. These changes have been handled without modification of the

original document through what is called an Amendment. But what does the final

document look like? How did these Amendments actually change what that document

said? This repository answers those questions, to the best of my ability.



Gitmoji is utilized to signal the type of change being made. As these are

create for software and not legal documents, some imagination may be needed.

https://gitmoji.carloscuesta.me/



## Who Made the Change?



I tried my best to identify a primary author of the Amendment utilizing that

person as the Author of the commit. I also used the ability to change the

commit date... which was not have been the best choice. Git dates are incapable

of representing the year in which these events took place; in this case the

1970's could be represented so I decided to ignore the first two digits.



With the exception of the commits made in 1971, the year was actually 1791,

I did this:



1983 - Drop the 19 and add 1000 => 183x



Thus We don't have a specific year and it is confusing.



Going forward though, any amendments should use the actual amended date since

there will be no confusion for this scheme and anything occurring after 2000.



## The Eighteenth Amendment



I would draw attention to Amendment XVIII.



https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution/commit/6ab65486ff0c542a24d0d8c1f38f7d0cf15d7490



This was the only amendment to the Constitution which deserved the addition of

a new Article. All other modifications had a reasonable Article they either

modified or expanded on. The 18th Amendment however was the prohibition of

alcohol, the only amendment to directly affect what people could do within

their state. All other content in the Constitution covers how the government

is put together, what role each segregation plays and even puts restrictions on

what States can do.



I had considered adding additional content to this commit that wasn't found in

the Amendment. Why? Because I wanted to clearly state that the government was

granting themselves the power necessary to enforce this. But at last I did not,

because Article I Section 8 ends with



> To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into

Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this

Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or

Officer thereof.



Which looking at again, does not say they have the power to lay laws to enforce

the Articles of the Constitution, but instead the Powers vested by this

Constitution... Hmmm, I expressly removed the portion of the Amendments which

actually granted power to enforce the Amendment (as still visible in the

amendments.md file).



Makes you wonder if this was what was needed to ban alcohol, where does the

government get the power to ban drugs.



## Additional Contributions



Since the historic modifications are complete, additional markdown formatting

is welcome.



While the master branch shall remain the actual edits to the Constitution, feel

free to propose a new branch that include changes you'd like to express. I'll

arbitrarily evaluate if it is suitable to be added. One idea might be to change

the Constitution to clearly state the powers the government is executing with.



Keep in mind this is not a formal platform to establish Constitutional changes.



## Rewrite



This repository is a retroactively completed depiction of history, thus git's

history has needed to be corrected due to the failures to get some messages

correct. For this reason the git history is being rewritten.



As such, rewrites will have their original work preserved on a branch as

attempt-#



Attempt-2 - [Issue-20](https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution/issues/20)

Article I is duplicated caused by https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution/commit/1e6aa0520e8d7d82c581b0f9aab16d6ebf03638f