Constitutional Amendments 16-19

There’s a lot of Constitutional Amendments but I recently learned a lot about the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th, and 19^th Amendments. Some of them we still use to this day, but others have been ignored and tweaked a little bit. Amendments are basically like great laws that everybody in America has to follow. They give rights to citizens like the right to remain silent and many more. But the ones that I am going to be talking about in this essay is mostly going to be Amendments that kind of act like laws more than rights.

The 16^th Amendment was ratified on February 13^th, 1913. This Amendment gave a right to Congress. Specifically, it gave them the right to collect income tax. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. They are allowed to collect income tax based on a person’s level of income. So everyone would be in a different situation depending on how much money they receive. This is when the taxes started to get even crazier in the America. Taxes are included in basically everything in our country to this day. They have even made a no tax day right before school starts where everything in the clothing section of purchases have no taxes added on. One day out of the year. The rest of the days just have more and more taxes on everything. They keep finding other ways that they can tax the population. They’re going to start taxing us on breathing air sooner or later because that’s how crazy it’s getting.

The 17^th Amendment was ratified on April 8^th, 1913. It talks all about Senators and how they are elected. It also states that each state must have two Senates. Also, just like the President, the Senate gets voted by the people. I think that’s the right way to do it. Because the people are what make up the population. So we should have a voice in who we want to run our country. This is what is called a democracy. This hopefully will never change because I think this is the best way to run a country. The people who live in the area can have a voice. Plus, the person gets elected fairly. We never want to change to a different government like a dictator for example. This is when the person who runs the country stays put in that place until they die and all of the population does not have a voice. There are other types of government but that is one of the worse ones that we never want to turn into.

The 18^th Amendment was ratified on January 16^th, 1919. This one is quite simple but we don’t use it at all to this day. It didn’t really have anything to do with politics. It had something to do with liquor. Basically, the sale, manufacture, import, export, or transportation of intoxicating liquors were prohibited. Of course, you can tell right away that this is not in use to this day because it’s very common for people to purchase these beverages. A movement called the temperance movement is what sparked for this new Amendment to be made. But this was a failure because the choice to purchase these liquors, is for the personal decision of whoever is buying it. Yes, it does cause some people to become alcoholics, but that is their decision and it’s not up to the government to decide that for them. So overall it was not possible to keep this Amendment strong so it was just simply reversed.

This is probably my favorite Amendment out of all of the ones that I talked about in this essay. The 19^th Amendment was ratified on August 18^th, 1920. This one stated that the government cannot deny anyone to vote because of their gender. This made men and women have equal rights. Personally, I think that this should have happened much earlier because it just doesn’t make sense to hold other people back with less rights just because of what gender they are. This Amendment doesn’t really need that much explaining because it’s a quite simple concept. But I like when things like this happen in history because frankly, everyone is the same. Yes, we have different personalities, but I mean we are all humans. Everyone should have the same rights. If they don’t, then it’s just becoming a double standard. If someone is trying to state their own personal opinion…. They have that right. If they are getting told that they can’t do that, stand by their side and support them! Even if you don’t agree with their opinion they do have the right to have their own thoughts. If you don’t support them because you don’t agree on their specific opinion, then that is just showing that your rights should be taken away too. Because everyone has different views on different subjects. Just because someone doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t mean that they don’t have the right to personally think those thoughts.

Overall, some of these Amendments make a lot of sense, but others didn’t really work out and didn’t make the country any better. But Amendments do help the country we just have to keep everyone in check that we continue to follow them.