Unratified Amendments to the U.S. Constitution
npr.org
npr.org
If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.
Mainstream US history strongly suggests that this amendment was never ratified; it came within a hair's breadth before the process was interrupted by the War of 1812. But enterprising conspiracy theorists^H^H^H^H^H^Hhistorians claim to have uncovered printed copies of the US Constitution indicating that Virginia had provided the critical 13th ratification, and that the amendment is technically in force.
This forms the basis of a particularly virulent strain of Sovereign Citizenism ("Thirteentherism"). To wit: if the "original" 13th Amendment is in force, and practicing lawyers use the "title" "Esquire", then no lawyer participating in any legislature can be a citizen, and virtually all the laws passed in every legislating body in the country are null and void.
This is silly on many levels ("esquire" wasn't a title of nobility, nor is it a title of any sort since it isn't hereditary, and, obviously, there isn't a secret original 13th Amendment) but that doesn't keep hundreds of people from relying on it to avoid paying taxes or, for that matter, filing hundreds of abusive false liens on the property of "illegitimate" public officials.
All praise the great money spider.
And any one who went on RT and got paid is in trouble
Ironically, it gave me some comfort to know that the issue was as politically impossible to pass then as it is now. It gives me hope that it could be passed knowing that opinion, not a cabal of interests, stands in the way.
See, for example, the tax bill of 2017.
The algorithm need not actually determine the districts. It can instead simply rate proposals, allowing a contest to be held. The highest scoring proposal submitted at least 400 days prior to the election is the winner, with earlier submissions winning any ties.
Another improvement would be to let districts spill over state borders. One could exempt Alaska and Hawaii of course.
This is of course by design. The founder's obviously knew about proportional representation and they deliberately chose to disregard it. Shouldn't that give you pause to figure out why?
This is, of course, no longer relevant.
But it is still relevant for just about all the reasons it was relevant then.
Another major factor is that Americans mostly see themselves as citizens of the USA first, and citizens of their state a distant second.
Turns out the reason was slavery. A huge proportion of the Southern population was enslaved, and slaves didn't vote. The free staters didn't want slaves to even count toward state population for the purposes of congressional apportionment, while the slave staters did, so they compromised on counting the slave population at 3/5 of the free population. As a result, prior to the abolition of slavery, the votes of free men in slave states were always represented at a higher proportion than the votes of free men in free states.
Many of the founders were wise and educated men who thought carefully and critically about how to establish a sustainable republic. But to do so, they had to win the votes of a cross-section of the American establishment of the time, many of whom thought that owning human beings, using them as farm labor, and whipping them if they disobeyed were morally acceptable things to do. And upon making a series of political compromises with these people, they had to rationalize those compromises in such a way to make them palatable to the general public.
population of Kansas (state): 2.9 million
population of New York (city): 8.5 million
If little states have no say in our government, what point is there for them to remain?
It's a pity some folks devalue others simply because they don't wish to live in NYC or LA.
You are arguing for the minority to trample on the majority.
It needs to be competitive. The majority shouldn’t be able to have its way without the help of the minority.
For example, the percentage of rural Americans is similar to the percentage of black Americans. Yet somehow nobody ever argues that black Americans need power disproportionate to their numbers to avoid being trampled.
It's not about rural vs urban. It's about the assumption that the US is a union of separate _states_ with separate legal structures, cultures, etc, etc. So it's not the "rural minority" that's special; it's states that are special.
Now you may disagree with the premises there, of course. But if one accepts the premises, then one needs a way to prevent "big" states from just imposing their will on "small" ones.
(There are in fact people who argue that black Americans need disproportionate power, and some voting districts are set up to effectively produce that, but that has nothing to do with the setup of the US constitution per se.)
Of course you need this if one accepts the premise that states are special. You’re basically just assuming the conclusion at that point.
I’m not aware of any voting district that’s set up to give black Americans a disproportionately large amount of power. There are some that are deliberately set up to ensure proportionate power.
My point is this: delegating power to solely the majority is a bad idea, full stop. In a properly functioning society, the majority needs to work cooperatively with the minority, which means the minority needs some sort of functional advantage (like we have in the US Senate, with respect to states).
How individual states set up this power balance internally is up to them. Obviously I think it should follow a similar model to the one we have at the federal level with our collection of states.
It annoys me when people rag on smaller areas like RI or WY because they get “extra privileges” or some such nonsense when it comes to elections or the US congress.
In reality, there’s a different minority for every issue. Giving states with low population a disproportionate amount of power doesn’t necessarily balance the minority with the majority. Depending on the issue it may allow the majority to more easily trample the minority, or it may allow a minority to impose its will on the rest.
The solution to requiring cooperation with the minority is to require more than a simple majority to do things. See for example: removal following impeachment, constitutional amendment, treaty ratification, or the de facto situation in the Senate for most legislation at the moment.
Federal republics _need_ the power balance among _states_, otherwise there's no point in the states participating in the republic, thus no point in even having a federal republic. If that's your point, fine. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.
How states want to balance out things internally is up to them, and that can be used to help the minority on specific issues.
In any case, even if you take the state as the unit that needs to be balanced, my point stands: you can’t balance “the minority” by picking some arbitrary minority and giving them more power.
States have senators to prevent tyranny of the majority. NYC should be worth more house seats than all of Kansas.
Except in Maine and Nebraska (selection of Presidential electors is largely a matter of state law, and most but not all states are winner take all.)
* All boundaries of a congressional district must be either a state's boundaries or fixed to a single latitude and/or longitude and meet at an approximate 90deg.
* Exceptions to the prior mentioned rule are acceptable only in the cases of remainder space, which is space remaining for a congressional district only after the prior rule is otherwise fully executed.
* Remainder space districts must not be adjacent.
---
An alternative approach:
* Congressional districts must be limited to county borders in the case of low population density districts that may comprise multiple counties or subdivided entirely within a single county for high density districts.
* Subdivision of a county must occur strictly upon either points of latitude or longitude, but not both and cannot exceed the borders of any single county.
---
I believe the shape and size of congressional districts should be flexible to account for variances of population density. I happen to live in a state with a huge population and perhaps the most wild fluctuations in population density. For horrid examples of gerrymandering view our current congressional districts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_de...
Also, if you're going to go straight into fantasy land to solve gerrymandering, you can just do party-list proportional representation by state, or STV for smaller states, and then there's no districting at all. There's nothing in the constitution requiring congressional districts at all.
If you cannot expect congress to act in the peoples' interest the only viable solution is through federal court action. In the mean time, since I am in fantasy land (as you call it), I will prefer practical solutions no matter how improbable in the real world over constitutional amendment which is even more imaginary.
Also there is no reason to expect increased seats in congress will have any effect upon gerrymandering and may even make it substantially worse. It certainly won't make law making more efficient.
And while you could try to gerrymander an 11,000 seat House of Representatives, it would be a lot harder.
I personally think it would be interesting to have more federal districts scattered throughout the US than just D.C., and representatives would adjourn at the nearest one. In the age of the Internet and video conferencing it seems like a neat idea.
(Tangentially related, but on the matter of residents of D.C. not having a voting member in Congress: I don't think you should be able to take up residency in D.C. in the first place.)
as I've become more open to other people's political worldviews, I've come to understand that any extant political 'movement' (for lack of a better term) has advocates (and opposition) in both categories you mention: interested beneficiaries and prescriptive advocates.
A better example might be the 17th amendment, which changes the way that US senators are elected as described in Article I.
It's my opinion that if there was a new amendment that would be in direct conflict with the other amendments without expressly repealing them the conflicting amendment it would be a constitutional crisis and it would cause political instability.
It would be, at the very least, go to the Supreme Court.
Where I imagine you could get a crisis is if an amendment passes and then some (powerful) people then say "oh by the by -- did you notice that it implicitly limits X part of the bill of rights".
Still this is not very likely. Not because people in the US don't want to wind back fundamental rights. But because they have easier ways of doing it than passing amendments -- even sly ones.
> No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
What the Corwin Amendment does, then, is ban further amendments that would abolish slavery. But since the prohibition against slavery is now already part of the constituion, it would, AFAICT, not be affected by the hypothetical ratification of the Corwin Amendment.
I'm not sure it even does that. Reading the passage you quoted, it seems like it only bars amendments that give Congress the power to interfere with state slavery laws. But the amendment that freed the slaves didn't give Congress that power, it just freed the slaves itself. It sounds like The Corwin Amendment only covers attempts to abolish slavery that wouldn't go through the process of ratification by the states.
And before the Civil War, that understanding might well have held in both the North and the South. Indeed northern states often thumbed their noses at the federal fugitive slave laws -- including the Constitution.
By the time of the war though, the political state of play was that state sovereignty and the abolition of slavery were at loggerheads -- and abolishing slavery was far more important.
* Does an amendment to the Constitution have the power to prevent amendments to the Constitution? If so, do later amendments have the ability to overturn this limitation of power?
* Would the amendment actually have any effect, since the 13th amendment was enacted before the Corwin Amendment? That is, is the amendment implicitly retroactive?
* Is it possible for states to rescind their ratification? For that matter, can Congress rescind its ratification?
* For bonus points, try to figure out what the rules are for the Article V convention to amend the Constitution, in particular in deciding whether or not we are supposed to be having one right now.
Ultimately, as we have seen countless times including now, in China, and 2 years back in Turkey, might is right and any constitution can be amended arbitrarily under the right circumstances by the right people with the right power and control over armies.
1.
Article Five of the US Constitution specifies the manner in which the constitution can be amended. It expressly prohibits any amendment that would deprives a state of its equal suffrage in the Senate. Therefore, the Constitution itself prevents certain amendments to the Constitution. It stands to reason that, should you wish to change the Senate away from an equal number of Senators per state, you would need two amendments. One to allow such an amendment and then a second which would itself be that amendment.
That the Constitution provides a process for amendment is proof that its framers intended for it to be amended. That they specifically laid out certain things which could not be amended indicate that they intended for it to be possible to amend anything and everything else. That the amendment procedure was itself not included in the list of unamendable things includes it in the list of amendable things. Therefore the list of unamendable things is in the scope of amendments as something which may be amended.
Of course, later amendments may repeal earlier amendments.
2.
If a state ratified two conflicting amendments - A and B - I would say that the latter of the two ratifications would take precedence. Now, if Congress passed A first and then B, and B was ratified by enough states first and then A was ratified by enough states, I would say that you would have a nice little Constitutional crisis on your hands.
I think the rational solution would be to follow the Convention process for amendments as laid out in Article 5. That way the states can sort it out definitively, federal Congress be damned.
3.
No.
4.
Since I mention it earlier as a way to solve the conflicts between the 13th and Corwin amendments, the plain reading of the text suggests that each state legislature applies to hold a constitutional convention. The natural body to collect and manage these applications is Congress itself. When Congress has 2/3 of the States applying for such a convention they will determine the process for the convention.
This makes no sense to me but is pretty common thinking. It's crazy that we expect the original authors of the Constitution to have considered every possibility exhaustively.
To put the idea in a different context, if I fail to blacklist a particular string in my webapp, does that mean I intended to let it through? Or could it be possible that, through negligence, a lack of research, or some other reason, that the string was omitted in error?
So, back to the real issue: The Constitution specifies the process that we have. "They didn't think of this" != "we don't have to follow what it says".
He, per his teacher, was a mediocre student at UT Austin and only received a C on the class he was attending. He was, however, dogged enough to persuade the states to ratify the amendment.
His former teacher had learned of his role in getting the amendment passed and during the show, the UT President presented Gregory with an upgraded grade (A).