Category: US Constitution

July 9, 1868 – The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship and all persons in the United States due process of law.

7/9/2021

The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. Often considered one of the most consequential amendments, it addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress. The amendment, particularly its first section, is one of the most litigated parts of the Constitution, forming the basis for landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) regarding racial segregation, Roe v. Wade (1973) regarding abortion, Bush v. Gore (2000) regarding the 2000 presidential election, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) regarding same-sex marriage. The amendment limits the actions of all state and local officials, and also those acting on behalf of such officials.

The amendment's first section includes several clauses: the Citizenship Clause, Privileges or Immunities Clause, Due Process Clause, and Equal Protection Clause. The Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship, nullifying the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which had held that Americans descended from African slaves could not be citizens of the United States. Since the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Privileges or Immunities Clause has been interpreted to do very little.

The Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without a fair procedure. The Supreme Court has ruled this clause makes most of the Bill of Rights as applicable to the states as it is to the federal government, as well as to recognize substantive and procedural requirements that state laws must satisfy. The Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people, including all non-citizens, within its jurisdiction. This clause has been the basis for many decisions rejecting irrational or unnecessary discrimination against people belonging to various groups.

The second, third, and fourth sections of the amendment are seldom litigated. However, the second section's reference to "rebellion, or other crime" has been invoked as a constitutional ground for felony disenfranchisement. The fourth section was held, in Perry v. United States (1935), to prohibit a current Congress from abrogating a contract of debt incurred by a prior Congress. The fifth section gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment's provisions by "appropriate legislation"; however, under City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), this power may not be used to contradict a Supreme Court decision interpreting the amendment.

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June 8, 1789 – James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in Congress.

6/8/2021

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One week after the first Congress to sit under the newly ratified Constitution had convened, James Madison, a representative from the Commonwealth of Virginia, address a committee of the House. First, he suggested that the committee should call for the full house to sit as a committee of the whole to here his proposal, but when the committee objected to this, he acquiesced and instead read his prepared remarks into the record. After further debate, however, the committee agreed that Madison's proposal - to add to the Constitution a Bill of Rights - was of sufficient import that it should be referred to a committee of the whole. You can read the full text of Madison's address here.

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June 4, 1919 – Women's rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.

6/3/2021

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The Nineteenth Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution prohibits the United States and the states from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, in effect recognizing the right of women to a vote. The amendment was the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage in the United States, at both the state and national levels, and was part of the worldwide movement towards women's suffrage and part of the wider women's rights movement. The first women's suffrage amendment was introduced in Congress in 1878. However, a suffrage amendment did not pass the House of Representatives until May 21, 1919, which was quickly followed by the Senate, on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification, achieving the requisite 36 ratifications to secure adoption, and thereby go into effect, on August 18, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was certified on August 26, 1920.

Contrary to a widely held belief, the 19th Amendment was not universally supported by women in the United States. Moreover, there was a significant amount of support for extending suffrage to women within the male population. Another misconception is that women were denied the vote at the time of the formation of the United States, which in fact women could vote in many elections on the local and state level in the colonies and in the early days of the Republic. Likewise, many states had already extended the voting franchise to women for local, state, and even national elections before the passage and ratification of the amendment.

In fact, only seven states -- Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama -- did not have any form of women's suffrage at the time the Amendment became law. Western States had been among the first to extend full suffrage to women, whereas New York and Michigan were the only states east of the Mississippi River to have done so.

Mississippi was the last state to ratify the Amendment (among those existing at the time of its proposal) on March 22, 1984

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June 2, 1774 – The Quartering Act of 1774, which was one of the "Intolerable" Coercive Acts of the British Parliament, is enacted

6/1/2021

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Quartering of troops refers to not only their housing, but also relates to their provisioning with food, clothing and other necessities. It had long be the custom of European armies to requisition all that they needed during a campaign from the populace of the territory in which they were operating, whether it was their own territory or that of an ally or enemy. The officers charged with overseeing this aspect of the campaign were "quartermasters." In theory, compensation was to be paid to those quartering troops on national or allied territory, but in practice the quartermasters, who were also in charge of paying the troops, were chronically short of funds. During peacetime, however, the relatively small standing armies were generally stationed in barracks or as garrisons of fortresses.

With the expansion of European colonies in the America's the need for large standing armies to defend against both native attacks and belligerent rival states, quartering in peacetime became more common. Initially, the Quartering Act of 1765 applied only to commercial establishment, such as inns and taverns, and the expenses for quartering troops were to be paid by the colonial government. This practice was actually popular with the innkeepers and tavernkeepers, who were provided with regular payment, but less so with the colonial administrators who had to find the funds to make these payments.

The Quartering Act of 1774 was enacted in response to the failure of the local legislatures to provided the needed funds and allowed the royal governor of each of the British Colonies to quarter troops without assent of the owner of the property or with compensation unless such was provided by the legislature. In principle, the Act was limited to quartering troops in unoccupied buildings, but in practice this rule was not always observed, though the quartering of troops with colonial families was far less widespread that is often portrayed. Rather, many of the soldiers, typically officers, who lived in colonial homes were boarders who paid for the accommodations from their own resources or from a stipend paid by the army.

What the colonists found to he "intolerable" about the Quartering Act of 1774 was that it bypassed the traditional role of the legislature in controlling its expenditures. Furthermore, involuntary quartering had been outlawed in Britain as early as 1723 as part of the Mutiny Acts addressed to military discipline, but the British Army did not recognize the Munity Acts as applying in colonial possessions.

Quartering of troops illegally was one of the grievances stated against King George III in the Declaration of Independence and was the subject on the 3rd Amendment to the Constitution. Although quartering of troops is no longer a common practice in modern armies, the principles of the limits on executive power implied by the 3rd Amendment have been cited in several Supreme Court opinions. More recently, the amendment has become the focus of debate over the power of the federal government to requisition property during national emergencies.

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May 7, 1992 – Michigan ratifies a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution making the 27th Amendment law. This amendment bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a mid-term pay raise.

5/7/2021

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The Twenty-seventh Amendment (Amendment XXVII) to the United States Constitution prohibits any law that increases or decreases the salary of members of Congress from taking effect until the start of representatives' next set of terms of office. It is the most recently adopted amendment but was one of the first proposed.

The 1st Congress submitted the amendment to the states for ratification on September 25, 1789, along with 11 other proposed amendments (Articles I–XII). The last ten Articles were ratified in 1791 to become the Bill of Rights, but the first two, the Twenty-seventh Amendment and the proposed Congressional Apportionment Amendment, were not ratified by enough states to come into force with them.

The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. An unconvinced teaching assistant graded the paper poorly, motivating Watson to launch a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.

Initially, the process was slow, but as more states voted to ratify, the movement gained national attention leading to apparently Michigan being the 39th state to ratify on May 7, 1992. Although the amendment was subsequently certified on May 19, 1992 and published in the Congressional Record with both housing of Congress voting the following day to accept the amendment as ratified by the requisite 2/3's majority of the states, it was subsequently discovered that Kentucky, which was initially recorded as not having ratified the amendment until March 21, 1996, had actually ratified on June 27, 1792 following admission to the Union. Thus, the 27th Amendment was legally ratified on May 5, 1992, when Missouri and Alabama had both ratified.

Image: Gregory Watson in 2017. Watson originally received a C- on his paper, which was subsequently changed to an A in 2017 in recognition of his achievement in having the Amendment ratified.

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April 27, 1861 -- President Lincoln Suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus

4/27/2021

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On May 27, 1861, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland issues Ex parte Merryman, challenging the authority of President Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. military to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (the legal procedure that prevents the government from holding an individual indefinitely without showing cause) in Maryland.

Early in the war, President Lincoln faced many difficulties due to the fact that Washington was located in slave territory. Although Maryland did not secede, Southern sympathies were widespread. On April 27, 1861, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia to give military authorities the necessary power to silence dissenters and rebels. Under this order, commanders could arrest and detain individuals who were deemed threatening to military operations. Those arrested could be held without indictment or arraignment.

On May 25, John Merryman, a vocal secessionist, was arrested in Cockeysville, Maryland. He was held at Ft. McHenry in Baltimore, where he appealed for his release under a writ of habeas corpus. The federal circuit court judge was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who issued a ruling, Ex parte Merryman, denying the president’s authority to suspend habeas corpus. Taney denounced Lincoln’s interference with civil liberties and argued that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ.

Lincoln did not respond directly to Taney’s edict, but he did address the issue in his message to Congress that July. He justified the suspension through Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, which specifies a suspension of the writ “when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Although military officials continued to arrest suspected Southern sympathizers, the incident led to a softening of the policy. Concern that Maryland might still secede from the Union forced a more conciliatory stance from Lincoln and the military. Merryman was remanded to civil authorities in July and allowed to post bail. He was never brought to trial, and the charges of treason against him were dropped two years after the war.

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July 9, 1868 – The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship and all persons in the United States due process of law.

June 8, 1789 – James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in Congress.

June 4, 1919 – Women's rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.

June 2, 1774 – The Quartering Act of 1774, which was one of the "Intolerable" Coercive Acts of the British Parliament, is enacted

May 7, 1992 – Michigan ratifies a 203-year-old proposed amendment to the United States Constitution making the 27th Amendment law. This amendment bars the U.S. Congress from giving itself a mid-term pay raise.

April 27, 1861 -- President Lincoln Suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus

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