What word means to approve or confirm?

The word that means to approve or confirm, on the USCIS reading vocabulary list, is Ratify. To ratify is to give formal consent to an agreement, treaty, or constitutional amendment, making it valid and legally binding.

The verb appears in several distinct constitutional contexts. First, the original Constitution itself was ratified by the states: Article VII required ratification by the conventions of nine of the thirteen states for the Constitution to take effect among those nine, and Delaware was the first to ratify on December 7, 1787, with New Hampshire becoming the ninth on June 21, 1788. Rhode Island was the last of the original thirteen to ratify, on May 29, 1790.

Second, constitutional amendments must be ratified by three-fourths of the states (currently 38 of 50) under Article V before they take effect; this is how all 27 amendments have been added. Third, treaties negotiated by the President are submitted to the Senate for ratification, and a two-thirds vote of the Senators present is required to give consent under Article II, section 2, clause 2. The verb is also used for state legislative confirmation of various federal actions and for state constitutional amendments.

The ratification debate over the original Constitution produced two important political camps: Federalists, who supported ratification and included Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (who together wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym Publius), and Anti-Federalists, who feared centralized power and demanded a bill of rights. The compromise that secured ratification was the implicit promise to add a bill of rights, which the First Congress proposed in 1789 and the states ratified by 1791.

On the reading test Ratify may appear in sentences about the Constitution, amendments, or treaties.