Congress sends twelve amendments to the states, ten of them the Bill of Rights
Anti-Federalists had warned the new Constitution left liberty unguarded, and several states had ratified it only on a promise that amendments would come. On September 25, 1789, Congress passed twelve constitutional amendments and sent them to the states. Ten would become the Bill of Rights. A twelfth, governing how House seats grow with population, never got the votes it needed. (A separate amendment on congressional pay, not mentioned here, would wait two centuries to be ratified.)
The Bill of Rights gave Americans the specific language, free speech, due process, and jury trial, that every later civil liberties fight has argued from. The forgotten second amendment in the package, on congressional pay, sat idle for two centuries before Americans ratified it anyway in 1992, showing that the amendment process the founders designed could still be completed, even two centuries late.
QWhat grade did Gregory Watson get on the term paper that eventually became the Twenty-seventh Amendment?
Watson's professor gave the paper a C, unconvinced that a 1789 amendment could still be ratified two centuries later. Undeterred, Watson turned the argument into a personal crusade, running his letter-writing campaign out of a $6,000 budget starting in 1982. He mailed state legislators, tracked down obscure ratification records, and pushed the long-dormant Congressional Compensation Amendment state by state until it cleared the three-fourths threshold in 1992. He later asked the university to reconsider the grade. A low mark on a term paper ended up driving one of the strangest constitutional victories in American history.
QHow narrowly did the Senate rewrite Madison's original amendment language before sending it to the states?
The Senate did not merely trim Madison's list. It altered it 26 times, reshaping wording the House had already approved. A conference committee then had to sit down on September 21, 1789, to hammer out a compromise between the House and Senate versions before either chamber would sign off. That negotiation squeezed the final twelve articles into shape just four days before Congress formally passed them on September 25. The number 26 rarely shows up in textbook accounts of the amendment process.
QWhy did a sitting U.S. senator publicly scold the National Archivist in 1992?
When Michigan and Alabama both ratified the pay amendment within two days of each other in May 1992, the Archivist certified it as the Twenty-seventh Amendment without waiting for Congress to weigh in. Senator Robert Byrd objected on the floor, calling the move a break from "historic tradition" since Congress had never gotten to formally review or accept the two-century-old ratification. Alabama's May 5 vote, not Michigan's more publicized May 7 vote, turned out to be the one that actually pushed the amendment over the line. Byrd's complaint went nowhere, and the amendment stood.
