I have a textbook called Constitutional Law that says Connecticut, Georgia, and Massachusetts ratified the Bill of Rights on April 19, March 18, and March 2, 1939, respectively. Is it true these states had been denying rights or is it just a misprint?
Once a constitutional amendment gets past the 2/3 thirds majority of states ratifying it that’s that…it’s the law of the land even if some states had voted against it or not bothered to vote on it at all.
I imagine that 1939 someone pointed out that those states had never ratified the Bill of Rights and someone had the grand idea that it’d be a nice symbolic gesture to vote on it even though it was meaningless.
Didn’t some southern state recently ratify the anti-slavery amendment?
I guess that’s right. I completely forgot that it had to be two thirds, not unanimous. It probably was a symbolic gesture.
Yeah, Mississippi recently ratified the anti-slavery amendment, ~1994 or so. Of course, slavery wasn’t allowed through that time, it was just a good will gesture. I remember Michael Moore doing a piece about it on TV Nation.
Some would say yes… :rolleyes:
Some would omit “until”.
Sorry to be picky, but a constitutional amendment has to be approved by THREE FOURTHS of the states, not two-thirds.
If two thirds were enough, the ERA would have passed easily.
As I recall, those three states were the only ones of the original 13 colonies which didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights back in 1789-91. On the 150th aniversay of the U.S. Constitution, in 1939, they decided to ratify them as a symbolic gesture.
As for not complying with the constitutional rights, at that time, the Supreme Court had not applied very many of the rights contained in the Bill of Rights to the states, via the 14th Amendment. Cardozo in the 20s, Frankfurter and Black in the 30s and 40s, were still debating how much of the bill of Rights applied to the states. The Warren Court in the 50s and 60s established that pretty much all of it did.
fiddlesticks:
This is a minor point, but I don’t think states can vote “against” an amendment. They either ratify it or they don’t.
Maybe a state legislature could pass a resolution condemning a proposed amendment, but that would just amount to a statement of opinion and would be constitutionally meaningless.
there were the cases where some states ratified the ERA, then later revoked their ratifications.