YaleCoursesModern Moves, Part 2 | America's Written Constitution with Akhil Reed Amar
YaleCourses
Bringing DC Into Elections 0:09
The 23rd Amendment lets the District of Columbia take part in the electoral college, the system that assigns each state votes for president based on population. DC still gets no seats in the House or Senate, but it now gets electoral votes as if it were a state. Amar notes that DC has long had a large Black population, going back to when it was itself a slaveholding jurisdiction bordering Virginia and Maryland. Bringing DC into presidential elections was therefore a move for democracy and racial justice at once, and it had backing from both parties, since between 1932 and 1972 Black voters were a genuine swing constituency both Republicans and Democrats were courting.
Cold War Pressure On Race 5:01
National security fed into this too. The United States was competing with the Soviet Union for influence in Africa, Asia, and South America, and the Soviets used American segregation as propaganda, pointing out that even the nation's capital denied fair voting rights to its many Black residents. The 23rd Amendment answered that charge. The same period brought Hawaii and Alaska into the union, moves also tied to Cold War strategy, projecting power toward the Pacific and Soviet Siberia, and both new states had large non-white populations, reinforcing the same pattern of democracy, race, and security moving together.
Ending The Poll Tax 10:33
The 24th Amendment bars poll taxes in federal elections, and the Supreme Court soon extended that principle to state elections as well. Poll taxes had mainly been used in the former Confederacy to disenfranchise Black voters, so this amendment, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was part of the same effort to make good on the 14th and 15th Amendments. Amar points out this reform coalition, drawing support from both parties, was again partly aimed at proving to a watching world that America practiced the equality it preached.
Fixing Presidential Succession 14:32
The 25th Amendment grew out of the shock of President Kennedy's assassination, which exposed how unclear the rules were for handling presidential death or disability, a dangerous gap in a nuclear-armed Cold War where minutes could matter. It confirms that a vice president who succeeds a dead or resigned president becomes president outright, lets a new president fill a vacant vice presidency subject to congressional confirmation, and allows a temporarily incapacitated president to hand power to the vice president and take it back smoothly afterward, as happened when Nixon picked Ford and Ford later picked Rockefeller.
Eighteen-Year-Olds Get The Vote 20:01
The 26th Amendment gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, driven largely by Vietnam and the argument, championed even by conservative Barry Goldwater, that anyone old enough to be drafted and die in the war was old enough to vote on it. Amar ties this to a recurring pattern in the story, that people who fight for the country, from Revolutionary War militiamen to Black Union soldiers to women supporting World War I, have historically won the right to vote as a result. The 27th Amendment, delaying congressional pay raises until after an election, gets only a brief mention as a small pro-democracy tweak first proposed by Madison and ratified two centuries later.
The Constitution Still Unfinished 23:31
Amar argues the real ending of the written Constitution is not the 27th Amendment but the open space after it, since amendments keep getting added in order, leaving the document permanently looking unfinished. He asks what a 28th Amendment might look like and treats that as a live question for the current generation to answer, just as earlier generations amended away the Constitution's proslavery elements. He closes on a photograph of the 1963 March on Washington, framing it as a continuation of the same story running through the whole lecture, ordinary people, including the marchers who heard Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, taking to the streets to demand rights, a demand that led directly to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
AI-generated summary. It can be wrong or incomplete - check anything that matters against the original.
