Amendment XXVI — Section 2

Amendment XXVI, Section 2 is the enforcement clause of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, which lowered the national voting age to eighteen. Its Section 2 mirrors the enforcement language found in the Reconstruction-era amendments — the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — as well as the Nineteenth Amendment, each of which concluded with a clause granting Congress the power to enforce its provisions through legislation. The framers of those earlier amendments had deliberately borrowed from the pattern established in the Thirteenth Amendment, and Congress continued that drafting tradition when proposing the Twenty-Sixth Amendment. The purpose of including such a clause was to make explicit that the new constitutional right was not self-enforcing in a vacuum but carried with it a positive grant of legislative authority to give it practical effect — including protections against state or local interference with the newly recognized right.