18th
Strange Fact Of The Day
I was reading the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, because I’m a huge dork like that, and I found some really interesting stories about the document upon which our country is based:
What we call the ‘Bill of Rights’ is known to refer to the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. We talk about the First Amendment as being:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Tenth Amendment is:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
HOWEVER, upon looking at the actual text of the Constitution, the document we know as the Bill of Rights was presented with TWELVE articles, with the third one being the ‘First’ Amendment and the twelfth one being the ‘Tenth’ Amendment.
So what happened to the first two? They read:
“Article the first. …. After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every 30,000 until the number shall amount to 100, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than 100 Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every 40,000 persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to 200; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than 200 Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every 50,000 persons.
Article the second … No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”
The first article was never ratified, and the second was ratified 202 years later as the 27th Amendment, in 1992. This was as a result of the actions of a student at the University of Texas, Gregory Watson, who studied the issue and realized that since there was no time limit on the amendment, it was still possible to ratify it. It took him ten years, but it was finally made law in 1992.
Watson also later brought to attention the fact that Mississippi had never ratified the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery), and Tennessee had never ratified the 15th Amendment, granting the rights of males of all races to vote. Once an amendment has been ratified by 3/4ths of the states it becomes law in all states, but it was still an outrageous situation to not have ratified those amendments. In fact, Mississippi’s only official declaration about the 13th Amendment had been a condemnation and rejection of it in 1865. Through his actions, both states symbolically ratified those amendments, in 1995 and 1997, respectively.
In the words of the late Notorious B.I.G., “If you don’t know, now you know.”
