By Zachary B. Wolf, CNN

(CNN) — The right and the left don’t agree on how they’d like to change the Constitution, but they do agree that changes need to be made.

President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, called for an amendment “to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office.”

That’s a clear nod to the Supreme Court’s granting of new immunity to presidents at the request of President-elect Donald Trump in 2024 when he was facing federal prosecution.

Separately, CNN has previously reported that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York made a last-minute push to convince Biden to certify an Equal Rights Amendment as the 28th Amendment. The amendment passed in the needed three-quarters of US state legislatures, but it took too long — decades instead of the seven years the amendment’s authors originally allowed.

Trump, meanwhile, has promised to challenge the 14th Amendment with an executive order rescinding the principle of birthright citizenship. He’s admitted that ending birthright citizenship could require going “to the people.”

And there are several distinct efforts to call a full-on convention of the states, the first in American history, to propose amendments. Conservative efforts have targeted a Balanced Budget Amendment they’ve long envisioned or, more generally, to limit the power of the federal government. Supporters of new gun laws have called for a convention to consider an amendment related to firearms.

What does it actually take to amend the Constitution? Here’s a breakdown:

How do amendments happen?

It is usually a long and complicated process, which is laid out in Article V of the Constitution. Here’s what it says:

In plain English, that means first an amendment has to be proposed, either by super majorities in the House and Senate or by a convention called by two-thirds, or 34, of the state legislatures.

After an amendment is proposed, it then has to be ratified by three-quarters, or 38, of the state legislatures or special conventions in the states.

(By the way, that note about no amendment being made until after 1808 has to do with the importation of enslaved people and taxes, a reminder that the values of the Founding Fathers were unquestionably flawed on the issue of freedom.)

Books have been written about the amendment process, and it’s important to note that it’s not at all clear how an Article V convention would go down. An interesting report by the Congressional Research Service raises some of the questions. Who would be the delegates? Could they consider multiple amendments? Would each delegate get a vote or each state?

While there is a clear desire to change elements of the nation’s founding document, answering those specific questions feels a long way off.

The time might be ripe for a new amendment

The most recent amendment, the 27th, was ratified in 1992, more than three decades ago. But it was actually first proposed by Congress back in 1789 along with the 10 amendments that became the Bill of Rights.

That amendment prohibits any law that changes the pay of lawmakers from taking effect until after the next election.

It was revived, improbably, by a University of Texas student in the early 1980s, Gregory Watson, who was frustrated when he got a C on a paper he wrote about the languishing amendment. True story. Lawmakers, for the record, passed a law that automatically gives them cost of living bumps, but they have blocked those since 2009, as we all learned when their first potential pay raise in more than a decade helped derail a bipartisan government spending bill last week.

The last newly suggested amendment to be ratified gave 18-year-olds the right to vote in 1971, a product of outrage at the Vietnam War.

Currently, more than half the states, 28, have some kind of call for a convention, according to the group Common Cause, which opposes a new convention.

And in California, lawmakers are nervously moving to claw back that state’s multiple dangling calls for a convention — the first passed in 1911 and the most recent in 2023 — to guard against such changes during the Trump administration.

Amendments have come in spurts

The nearly 33 years and counting since the most recent amendment is the third-longest dry spell in US history. The National Constitution Center breaks the periods of constitutional change into distinct eras.

The longest period between amendments, more than 60 years, was between the Founding Era early in the country’s history, including the Bill of Rights and early tweaks to the electoral college system and the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, which gave rights to African Americans, among other things.

In the Progressive era, Americans gave women the right to vote, imposed the income tax and required senators to be elected by voters. But they also banned alcohol for 13 years, during Prohibition.

Things have happened more slowly in the modern era, when Americans reclaimed their right to drink, abolished poll taxes, tinkered with presidential succession, imposed term limits on presidents, changed the voting age — and proved that Gregory Watson deserved an A on his college paper.

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