Let’s have some fun and learn something.
You got it! The Old Professor is going to drop some history that most have no idea about.
How well do you know your history of this country? (Purely rhetorical because most know little to nothing)
There has been numerous amendments considered to the Constitutional but we shot down….but what would this country look like if they had passed?
The United States Constitution had been in effect for little more than a year when Congress first moved to amend it. On September 25, 1789, the legislature sent a dozen proposed amendments to the then-13 states (soon to be 14) for ratification, as the law required. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-fourths of states had ratified 10 of the 12 amendments, which collectively became known as the Bill of Rights.
Another 17 amendments have been ratified in the 234 years since, for a total of 27. But these measures represent just a tiny fraction of the amendments that have been proposed in Congress over the years—nearly 12,000 to date.
“The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended,” writes historian Jill Lepore in her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. However, “almost all efforts to amend the Constitution fail. Success often takes decades. And for long stretches of American history, amending the Constitution has been effectively impossible.”
Most proposed amendments die quietly in congressional committees (if they even get that far), with only a few sent on to the states for ratification. At present, there are six proposed amendments awaiting possible state ratification—one of them dating back to 1789.
Many failed amendments have involved fairly minor administrative matters. But others would have changed the American government in substantial ways and possibly altered the course of history.
Here are a dozen of those failed amendments and what they set out to accomplish.
In 1866, Missouri Representative George Washington Anderson proposed dropping “United States” from the country’s name and simply calling it “America.” The current name was “not sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere,” he argued, albeit unsuccessfully.
Weighing in from across the Atlantic, the Illustrated London News mocked the proposal as the “verbal appropriation of a hemisphere.”
Just one hemisphere wasn’t enough for Lucas Miller, a first-term representative from Wisconsin. On a single February day in 1893, he introduced 46 bills, one of which would have changed the country’s name to the “United States of the Earth.”
Miller’s rationale, in his own words, was that “it is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it.” Another source suggests that he might also have settled for the “United States of the World.” Miller’s proposal was widely ridiculed at the time, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the congressman didn’t return for a second term.
(Read On)
There are a couple that would apply to the situation today….
Abolishing the Senate….not bad should be considered because the Senate is where good bills go to die.
Numbers 8 and 9 deserve consideration…
Numbers 10 -12 should already be part of the Constitution….
If you read the article then I would like to hear your thoughts on these past proposed amendments to our Constitution.
Be Smart!
Learn Stuff!
Class Dismissed
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”