United States Constitution

Copypasted here 6/17/25 from https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript using ctrl+c (click and drag cursor over text to highlight it then press ctrl+c), ctrl+shift+v into a LibreOffice Writer document (clicking on "unformatted text" before clicking "ok"), then ctrl+v into html documents, formatting into html for ease of reading. Amendments copypasted here 6/17/25

• U.S. Constitution Part 1
• U.S. Constitution Part 2
• U.S. Constitution Part 3
• U.S. Constitution Part 4 Amendments
• U.S. Constitution Part 5 Amendments
• U.S. Constitution Part 6 Amendments
• U.S. Constitution Part 7 Amendments

Any errors in transcription or in the process of ctrl+c ctrl+v (copying and pasting) are my own. I have formatted these the way I did for ease of reading but not intentionally altered the text other than that. I may have made a mistake here or there for which I apologize. Please feel free to make your own version of this, as a form of protest if you want.

Interesting stuff I noticed reading this, if this was actually considered to be law (and if I am understanding it right):

• Here's my favorite observation: Article the Seventh (aka the 5th Amendment): Now that Trump actually is part of a militia, he can probably be tried according to military law, and/or international military law. Has anyone tried that? It is constitutionally valid! Also regarding the defense against double jeopardy here, being tried for the same offense twice, I think it should be absolutely legal if the first trial or trials had absolute evidence of corruption and/or bribery.
• It's not clear whether this refers to the entire House of Representatives or to each individual State's representatives but if it's the latter: Each State can regulate its members in the House of Congress to a certain extent, and also punish them. (Article I, Section 5)
• The "Yea" or "Nay" vote on bills is something I used to vote for candidates when looking at their history in government. It's handy. (Article I, Section 7)
• Under Article I, Section 8, it says that Congress can fix the standard of weights and measures. Can we please switch to SI already?
• Under the same we see what is possibly one of the first (or actually the first) legal precedents for copyright protections and patents. We don't usually bootleg stuff like China does to make rinky-dink off-brand crap and as a result we get products that we can recognize and usually rely on.
• Under the same we also see that Congress can hold anyone accountable for violating "The Law Of Nations." Meaning they can hold anyone accountable using legal systems that are international, such as the Geneva Conventions. And they can call upon a militia (our current military) to suppress an insurrection and an invasion (which hey, what else would you call this wannabe king who didn't actually get elected and his ICE goons?). Under Article I Section 9 it states they can also suspend the writ of habeas corpus (right to go to court to determine if imprisonment is lawful) in case of rebellion or invasion where public safety requires it. Hey look, that's happening.
• Under Article I Section 9 has some interesting legal implications for anyone in the government accepting bribes of any sort from any "King, Prince or foreign state." The language says "present," as in gift, which can mean money or anything else. This includes people in state, city, government and international government. It does say if Congress consents to such bribes they are legal under the Constitution, which is pretty weird.
• Article II, section 4, also Article III, section 3 and Fourteenth Amendment, Section 3, and Amendment 22, they're pretty self-explanatory. It could've been done months ago and it was not. The logical conclusion is that there is much corruption in the House, the Senate and in the country. Interesting how Article III section 3 makes it so children of rich people who commit crimes and then die can receive hefty inheritances from the dead parents' crimes.
• Article III, section 2 defines that all crimes except impeachment (why?) are tried in court by jury. This means that the jury must be educated enough to understand when they're getting hoodwinked, and to understand the nature of what they are observing at the trial. It's the linchpin of all justice in this country. All of it. Interestingly, according to the same section, Congress has the authority to create a court case that will impeach.
• The first Amendment proposed on September 25, 1789: Not workable at the federal level, given you’d have something like 10,000 people in the House of Representatives at any given time creating a hell of a ruckus, but actually workable if you do this in each state government. That way your representative actually has a chance of knowing, if not you, at least the circles you move in and what your family/cliques/tribes/groups/clubs want most, and can lean on the person elected to represent your area in government to do those things.
• Eighth Article: this falls apart if anyone can pay for better lawyers than the other guy. Therefore, government sponsored lawyers for everyone must be a thing or we will not have any justice system left. I’m not for socialism as a general rule of thumb but when it comes to this it is crucial. Same deal with bail – we should not have it. It shouldn’t be a thing. As for the 7th Amendment in the Bill of Rights, I don't understand it. "Suits at common law" and "the rules of the common law" are vague, incomprehensible and undefined to the layman. I think I'd have to be a lawyer to get it but as far as I can tell, it means if you are poor and/or blue-collar you get a shittier legal system than if you are rich. The 5th and 6th Amendment also seem to have the same flaw.
• Tenth Article (aka 8th Amendment): Disagree. I think the punishment should fit the crime in certain cases. (See: list of people I think need to die under the Rights section) And by that I mean I’m all for capital punishment. Some things people do to other people are actually worse than death and by comparison to what they did, killing them is the merciful thing to do. Take the risk of letting them out in the general population? No way. That's what people justifiably go to wars for.
• Eleventh Article (aka 9th Amendment): Really vague, and not enforceable until those other rights are defined.
• Twelfth Article (aka 10th Amendment): Pretty much says “Power to the people.” Right on.
• Eleventh Amendment: Why does this exist? That said, it means anyone in the US can get sued by someone from outside the US using that country's legal system. In theory.
• Twelfth Amendment: More Electoral College schlock. I think it obfuscates the process of voting too much, but I also know that getting rid of it could be as bad. Regardless, I believe everyone needs to be held accountable for who they voted for by having who they voted for be public knowledge. It's government transparency, and we are the government. "We're the enemy!" I mean, technically, in some cases, yes. And it's important to know who's who.
• Thirteenth Amendment: On the grounds that public school can be and has been slavery for a subset of the population I believe GEDs at any age and a school building you can attend for as long as you need to in order to pass that test are necessary for this Constitutional right to be met. Children are people too and they need legal rights. Minimum wage also needs to be federally mandated for everyone, including children and teenagers, and it needs to take into account the cost of working (including commute, wear and tear on work-related items, etc.). Worker's rights needs to be a thing so that businesses are no longer dictatorships, business needs to be easy to establish so that monopolies no longer enslave people, monopolies need to be broken up. This is hardly Communist, this is Libertarian. No, Unemployment benefits and Social Security are Communism. Anyhow, if worker's rights aren't a thing, you get slavery in everything but name. Speaking of slavery under other names, see: women's rights, undocumented workers, Trump's G.I. Joe birthday party.
• Fourteenth Amendment: There are certain things in this founding document that just need to be crossed out. "Excluding Indians not taxed" is one of them, and in Article I section 2, "Three fifths of all other persons." Under 14th Amendment Section 2, the word "male" needs to be crossed out.
• Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1: Yep, you're not getting rid of me that easily. I count as one of the children of immigrants, and so does everyone born on U.S. soil.
• Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4: Under this neither Trump nor most of his administration and "friends" are allowed any sort of financial compensation from the U.S. government. Again (this is mentioned multiple times in the Constitution), Congress has the authority to enforce legislations for things like this.
• Fifteenth Amendment: I think looking at zip codes and seeing which have the most minorities and seeing which places have the easiest to access voting centers and conditions to vote (i.e. voting by mail, number of voting centers and their distribution in a given area, postal service that works etc.) will be pretty illuminating if someone runs a good study on it.
• Sixteenth Amendment: I think this may have been a mistake. You can probably trace back the mess that is the IRS and the near-impossibility of starting businesses without a business degree to this. It needs edits, revisions, and a variety of safeguards to ensure people who are poor can't be hurt by it and people who are rich can't be benefited by it.
• Seventeenth Amendment: I think this was a mistake. Less representation for the people and it's harder to get crappy candidates out of there.
• Eighteenth Amendment: A violation of civil liberties (namely, the right to hurt yourself in the name of freedom). Interestingly, the right of women to vote came after Prohibition and not before it. I checked the dates.
• Nineteenth Amendment: Again, now that women have the right to vote I sure do wonder how many of us (physical women at least) voted for who and want that to be public knowledge for everyone.
• Twentieth Amendment, Section 2: Congress must by law assemble once a year?! When they have this much government power, and can just sit pretty the other 364 days? I think they must by law be in office at least 358 days a year and if they're lucky get a week off!
• Twenty-third Amendment: I'm not sure we need this. Do we need this?
• Twenty-fourth Amendment: Obtaining state ID or a passport in order to vote is a poll tax because it costs money, both to buy the ID card and to buy the transportation required to physically get to the ID office when it's actually open, then go home, then go back to the place, etc. til it finally deigns to give you some damn ID. And then you gotta photocopy it (or whatever) if you have to vote by mail, requiring more transportation funds to get somewhere like the library or Kinko's, or to buy a printer or whatever. To say nothing of the medical costs you gotta incur if you want to vote when sick, or disabled and you can't vote by mail because your state sucks and doesn't allow it. (There are other cost-related barriers to voting and almost all of them can actually boil down to cost.) That's the only problem I have with requiring ID in order to vote. Considering how difficult voting is for large segments of the population, how valid is any election here, really? Also, with regards to losing things like your birth certificate or being born on a Native American Reservation, how hard it is to get ID?
• Twenty-seventh Amendment: Not really sure what this does or if it's necessary.

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