Seventeen amendments in the Bill of Rights

Factual Questions
1

A week or two ago, I saw on Jeopardy that the House of Representatives voted to propose 17 amendments as part of the Bill of Rights but that the Senate went along with only 12 of them. Ten were ratified early on and became the Bill of Rights. One was ratified 203 years after being proposed and became the 27th Amendment. One is yet to be ratified (and almost certainly won’t be).

I have found the texts of the six amendments proposed over the years by both houses but that were never ratified by the states. However, I have had no luck tracking down the texts of the 5 that were proposed by the House of Representatives along with what became the Bill of Rights. Does anybody know what they dealt with?

2

All that I can add here is that the most recent, the 27th Amendment, was initially called the first amendment and what we call the First Ammendment was actually the third. Then, back in 1990 or something, the 27th(1st) Ammendment was ratified. It basically prohibits congress from voting for a pay raise to take effect before an election. Already, this Ammendment HAS been violated;
"Congress voted last July 15 to accept a 3.4 percent salary increase, effective January 1, regardless of the 27th Amendment’s requirement that compensation changes commence after “an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” Congressmen feathered their beds by dubbing this unconstitutional pay hike a “cost-of-living adjustment.” The media and masses snored right through this shakedown. "
(http://www.cato.org/dailys/06-30-00.html)

3

bibliophage:

I am interested but that link does not want to work for me. Here is a quote concerning the 27th amendment that seems to contradict part of your post:

The quote is from this site. But they claim to get the info from the same source as your link http://www.house.gov ( Congress )

4

Well, this is only close. I was able to find a site that went through James Madison’s initial presentation to the House of suggestions for amendments. I would guess that the 17 amendments ratified by the House looked something like this (where there is an obvious correlation with the amendments that were adopted, I have put that in parentheses)

  1. Power of US gov’t is vested in and derived from the people
  2. Further limits on the number of Reps. (mostly to insure that there would be enough representatives)
  3. Members of Congress could not change their own pay without an intervening election (27th amdment)
  4. Religious freedom (1st amdmt.)
  5. Speech and Press (1st)
  6. Assembly (1st)
  7. Keep and bear arms (2nd) INCLUDING a clause that would recognize conscientious objection (1st?)
  8. No quartering of troops (3rd)
  9. Rights of accused/convicted: No double jeopardy, self-incrimination, due process, no loss of property w/out compensation (5th)
  10. No excessive bail, fines, nor cruel & unusual punishment (8th)
  11. Search & seizure limits (4th)
  12. Speedy trial, confrontation of accusers, right to atty., etc.(6th)
  13. Rights retained by people (9th)
  14. States cannot limit rights of conscience, press, or trial by jury
  15. Limits on appeals - jury as final authority on fact (7th)
  16. Trial by jury / indictment by grand jury (5/6)
  17. Reinforcement of separation of powers. - reservation of state’s rts. (10th)

(The site where I found this is http://www.jmu.edu/madison/madprobll.htm )

These may vary from those ultimately adopted by the House for the obvious reason that amendments were certainly possible. In addition, since these were the first amendments to be proposed, there was some question about how to accomplish them. Madison’s orignal proposal included language identifying where to cut and change language in the original Constitution. However, others in the House wanted to make the amendments “add-ons”, and Madison acceeded to this (apparently because it swayed some critical votes.) That means that the original proposal doesn’t break down into 17 parts - Madison presented it as 8 parts (with a ninth part that would renumber sections appropriately). I tried pulling out items, and happily came up with 17 - but that might have been pure chance.

There is a book entitled Creating the Bill of Rights : The Documentary Record from the First Federal Congress (ISBN 0801841003) which might have better information - but I am not in a library right now, so I can’t say for sure.

(I have seen some indications that the item about the number of members of the House actually was first on the list ultimately ratified by Congress, and the one ultimately adopted as the 27th amendment was the second on the list. Lets pick those nits, huh?)

5

Excellent first post, dorkbro. Very helpful. Welcome to the SDMB. You will be an asset around here, I can see.

Sorry about the broken link, 2sense. Try http://www.law.emory.edu/FEDERAL/usconst/notamend.html
or
http://majoritywhip.house.gov/constitution/Related-Topics/amendnot.htm

The 6 dealt with[ul]

  1. regulating the number of congressmen [1789]
  2. revoking US citizenship for those who accept foreign titles [circa 1791]
  3. prohibiting the banning of slavery [1861]
  4. giving congress the right to ban child labor [1926]
  5. giving equal rights to women [1971-72]
  6. granting congressional representation for the District of Columbia [1978][/ul]
6

According to books, I have on the adoption of the Bill of Rights, Madison got the House to approve 17 amendments. Madison wrote his amendments so that they could be mixed in with the existing Constitution instead of tacked on at the end. When they got to the Senate, two were rejected outright , one of which would have required that no state government infringe on the rights of an individual (had to wait for the 14th Amendment for that), and six pairs of articles were combined to make three amendments. This then leaves 12 amendments to vote on.

The narrative I have doesn’t delineate what parts were combined, but it does say that the 1st and 5th Amendments are pasteups.

If you can roundup a copy of the Congressional Record for 1789, you can probably get all the details.

7

Excellent suggestion. Here is Journal of the House (8/21/1789)

8

Bibliophage,
Glad you found the Journal of the House on the Web. I would hate to know that you had a copy of it at home.

The text of the first attempt at our present 2nd amendment would make interesting fodder for Great Debates.

The Senate Journal is also available online from the same site and you can see how the Senators (and there weren’t many of them there) voted on changing them around. One Senator proposed adding the guarantees of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into the Bill of Rights.