- The Constitution is an essential part of American life.

It's the playbook for how our government operates, but it's not perfect.

To start, it was written well over 200 years ago when women had no say in the process and slavery was still legal.

From time to time, 27 times to be exact, the American people have found it necessary to make changes.

If you want to amend the Constitution though, you'd better be ready for a long, uphill battle.

(upbeat music) There are two ways to propose an amendment and open it up for ratification.

Proposals must either pass a vote of approval by both bodies of Congress or what's known as a state convention.

These are meetings made up of individual state legislatures.

This method has never been used in the history of the Constitution.

Proposals must reach a 2/3 vote in both the House and Senate or from a state convention in order to be approved.

After passing that 2/3 vote, an amendment must pass an even higher hurdle.

In order to be ratified, we need to become a formal amendment, the proposal must pass a 3/4 vote by state legislatures or conventions called in each state.

With this high bar to clear, it can take a long time for an amendment to reach the necessary level of support.

Modern amendments are generally submitted with a deadline to reach that threshold of support before it's considered dead.

This is one of the reasons why the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment that would codify gender equality for women and men, has not become law despite reaching the necessary threshold of state legislature approval in recent years.

Since it wasn't ratified in the time set by Congress, the amendment's future remains uncertain.

Some argue that given our current political climate, a new amendment could face too many hurdles to become law, but stranger things have happened.

What amendment would you want to see added to the Constitution?

(upbeat music)