At least according to what I’ve read on Wikipedia, the Thirteenth Amendment was actually the easy one. Andrew Johnson sold the rebel states on ratifying the 13th as a way to quickly get back in good standing as members of the national government before the Radical Republican dominated legislature could reconvene. Given that slavery was all but annihilated already de jure by the Emancipation Proclamation and de facto by the Union armies giving every slave who wanted to a chance to run away, the states formerly in rebellion probably saw it as a cheap price to pay. Johnson also strongly hinted that if they did so it would forestall African-American citizenship and suffrage; either he flat-out lied to the southern states or was hoping moving quickly could make it a fait accompli.
It was the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments proposed and ratified at the height of Reconstruction where the question of coercion comes in, when the Republican dominated Congress flatly made ratification a condition of recognizing the southern state governments as eligible for delegates in Congress.
Also, I see that Union states Delaware and New Jersey did not ratify the 13th until after the fact, so that made gaining two more states the more vital. I suspect that the splitting off of West Virginia was motivated in part by the desire to bolster the numbers.
Sure, but the question is not about whether the Amendment was ratified but the process of ratification itself. Has any Amendment had to include states after it has been declared ratified? That alone sounds like a question that could be raised. Once you go down the rabbit hole, anything is possible.
I don’t understand this question. There are two ways to ratify a constitutional amendments: approval by two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress followed by ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures, or via state constitutional conventions requested by two-thirds of states. All adopted Amendments have been ratified by the first method, and once they are ratified they apply to all current and future states as an intrinsic part of the United States Constitution. Whether some states object, or the political climate changes such that there is post-ratification regrets is irrelevant, and the only way to negate an amendment is via ratification of another amendment, i.e. the 18th and 21st amendments.
I think @Exapno_Mapcase meant once the amendment was ratified and in effect, did any states still have to ratify it if they wanted to be readmitted to Congress? ETA: according to Wikipedia, yes for the Fourteenth Amendment: Virginia, Mississippi and Texas. And that’s problematic because a few states attempted to rescind their ratifications, which Congress rejected.
This entire thread assumes that the normal ratification process used by every other amendment exists. That’s not at all the issue. The OP’s question asks only whether any legal proceedings have questioned whether the ratification process for the Civil War amendments was legally valid. That question was seemingly answered completely by @Freddy_the_Pig.
Interleaved and out of the fog of other non-answers to the question are posts about the ratification process itself and other possible objections that could be raised in court. One such was @DrDeth’s correct observation that even if the Southern states were ineligible to ratify sufficient other states existed at the time to get to the 27 state requirement. My comment was merely that the fact that only 19 of the 27 were northern states allows for a further legal loophole issue despite the fact that all the nine states existing at the time later ratified the 13th Amendment*. Does that make a legal difference? I don’t know, but it is apposite to the question.
* Similar situations exist for the 14th and 15th Amendments.
States never legally seceded from the United States because there was no Constitutional process for them to do so as determined in Texas v. White, so there was no being ‘readmitted’ except in the sense that they could again send elected officials to Congress and be counted in the Electoral College count. Trying to ‘rescind their ratifications’ is not ‘problematic’ because there is no process for them to do so beyond campaigning for an additional amendment.
Again, whether any of this is legal theory that could have worked - and we all agree that it could not - that remains totally irrelevant to the question of what could be tried and if any objections, however implausible, had been actually introduced into a court proceedings.
Note Chronos, SDMB Mod Vs. Poster, thread 1021248, post 7.
As OP I exercise my right to appeal this thread to a higher forum for further discussion.
So does admission of a new state to the union imply that state ratifies any existing constitutional amendments (and the constitution itself?) Are there any cases about that? It appears they accept the constitution in whole, so an attempt to declare any amendment void would have to address how the states that subsequently accepted it as valid would legally address a new change to the constitution they did not agree with?
Plus, doesn’t the history of cases relying on these amendments implictly give them the imprateur of the Supreme Court? Validity already decided and all that…?
No because it would (kinda) not make sense. Once an amendment has been ratified and announced by the Executive Branch (it has been different offices over the years) the process is over and the amendment appies to every state whether or not they ratified it. Ratification after the fact is typically symbolic for example when Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment in 1995.
My point was admission to the union I assume implies recognizing all the amendments in force as valid. If an admendment is subsequently deemed invalid, would a state have the right to complain “we did not agree to a constitution without that amendment”? A sort of de facto approval was implied.
I suppose they’d have the same standing to complain as the states which had been in the union to ratify the amendment. IOW “We thought it was a good ides, we voted for it, it became a valid amendment. We wanted it. And now, years, decades, or centuries later circumstances have taken it away. We’re pissed.”
As a moral or political matter, sure they can complain. Do they have some sort of legal override veto to prevent the invalidation? I can’t see how.
There are only three amendments that could possibly be ruled invalid (except caveats below): an amendment outlawing the slave trade or changing the apportionment of a direct tax by population if it were ratified before 1808 (so a non-issue now) or an amendment changing equal sufferage in the Senate without the consent of the state(s) affected.
From Article V
provided that no amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.
So let’s an amendment is made that says states east of the Mississippi get 3 Senators and states west of the Mississippi get 2. Arizona’s House delegation and Senators unanimously vote against it, the state does not ratify it, and they file suit to get it the amendment ruled invalid. Meanwhile Puerto Rico is admitted and gets 3 Senators. SCOTUS rules the amendment invalid and Puerto Rico says, “No Biff. We agreed to join if we get 3 Senators.” Could Puerto Rico then introduce a bill to rescind there admission to the Union? Yes they can and in fact any state can at any time for any (or no) reason petition Congress to let them secede as a consequence of Texas v White. Your question is can Puerto Rico do it unilaterally under these circumstances and the answer is …
if SCOTUS says they can through a lawsuit.
But given the rather low-probability of the situation, I am not worried about it being anything other than an exercise in legal theory.
I suppose there could be a case where SCOTUS could rule an amendment invalid as not being ratified properly but other than clearly miscounting the states needed for ratification I don’t see SCOTUS getting involved in that political question. More interesting would be the Corwin Amendment.
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.
Introduced and passed by Congress with the required 2/3 vote before the Civil War, it is still in front of the states. So since it was sent for ratification before the 13th Amendment but (assuming it is) ratified after the 13th Amendment was, would the 13th Amendment now be invalid?
There’s kind of an interesting hypothetical here, though.
Let’s say there are 20 states in our hypothetical US. 15 of them ratify an amendment and 5 are vehemently opposed. 6 months later, 1 of these opposed states decides that it doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of history and so begrudgingly ratifies the amendment after it’s already been officially adopted. 6 months after that, it’s unearthed that one of the original 15 states didn’t actually ratify it correctly and no longer wants to. Hand wave away how that could actually happen.
The amendment still has the requisite 3/4ths of states, but the 16th state to ratify, now only the 15th, probably wouldn’t have if they had known that there were shenanigans behind the original ratification effort.
Does the whole thing need a do over? Or do we just accept that once an amendment is fully ratified, the process of how it got there is irrelevant and the only recourse for removing it as another amendment?
ISTM that’s the only practical solution. Anything else is fraught with crazy corner cases. Amendments are political acts. And can be superceded by subsequent political acts.
The problem with the highlighted assumption and the overall question is that it is positing corruption or gross malfeasance in the process of ratifying and adopting the amendment, and then asking to some über-Constitutional process for addressing this, when there is no such process in American jurisprudence. There are no tack-backs on ratification and once an amendment to the Constitution is ratified and adopted it is a legal fait accompli; the President can’t ignore it, Supreme Court can’t strike it, and the only process to nullify it is by Congress or a constitutional convention proposing, passing, and ratifying another amendment.
Since this has devolved into a general debate on the legal issues, I’ll add my 2-¢:
Agreed that in a quis custodiet ipsos custodes sense, the question of whether an amendment is recognized as having been ratified ultimately is a political question, technically in the hands of the federal Congress. Of course this leaves open the possibility of a tyrannical fed proclaiming– perhaps literally at gunpoint– that an amendment giving them absolute power was properly ratified and in force. But at that point legalism fails anyway.
The abiding issue with politics in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras was the following conundrum: how does one admit members into a representative democracy when by four years of bloody war they insisted that they didn’t want to be a part of it at all? Recall that the Fourteenth Amendment in addition to its other provisions forbade the federal government from repudiating its war debt; something that a Southern-dominated legislature might do if it was in a position to do so. Basically imagine if in 1945 the National Socialist Party of Germany insisted that the peace treaty with the Allies merely restore the 1933 status quo.
I think the Corwin amendment was problematic precisely because of its attempt to lock in slavery in perpetuity. Not that the seceding states were satisfied with it anyway, but a less problematic wording would have been to raise the bar for banning slavery to a unanimous ratification of the states.
I don’t know why SCOTUS wouldn’t consider striking it (or rather, why affected parties might ask). The court has invented powers for itself numerous times over our history, why not invent this one as well?
Obviously this is a bit of an absurd hypothetical, but it doesn’t seem too far fetched that MAGA would find some bogus argument for why the 14th amendment was improper, SCOTUS agreeing, and then the realpolitik reality that LSLGuy alluded to swings the other direction, and the amendment is effectively nullified.
But then, I’m on record as being ultra pessimistic about our current situation. I suppose whether or not the above is “constitutional” is irrelevant.