As the House proceeded toward approval of the amendment, he remarked that "it has always seemed to me that the Constitution of the United States was sufficiently important to consider both the merits and the form of the amendments which might be adopted to it.
It has seemed to me that we might take sufficient time at least to put an amendment into proper grammatical and rhetorical shape. All other changes were rejected as the amendment sped toward overwhelming approval, but the majority's floor manager told the House that "I would like to see the gentleman from Illinois gain one victory in this contest, and I therefore hope this amendment will be accepted.
Mann's "victory" came to naught, as Senate Republicans succeeded in substituting a different text for the House proposal in order to eliminate language, included at the insistence of the southern Democrats in the House, that would have exempted Senate elections from the regulatory power given to Congress.
Senator Bristow had introduced the substitute language at the beginning of the session. During the Senate debate, Bristow read aloud Article I, section 2, clause 1, on election of representatives and then the proposed substitute concerning election of senators. This juxtaposition apparently caused him to notice the difference between the language applying to the House which uses the singular "legislature" and that in his proposed amendment which referred to "legislatures".
He interjected, "I desire to say that, in line 2, page 2, of the proposed amendment, the word should be 'legislature' instead of 'legislatures'; that is, the s should be stricken off of the word, so that it will be singular instead of plural. Vice President James S. Sherman, in the chair, declared that "the amendment will be so modified, if there be no objection.
The next morning's New York Times bore evidence that Bristow might not have succeeded in deleting the s. In the full text of the amendment, printed on page 1, the s was still there. Nine days later, when the House resumed its consideration of the amendment and began to debate the language just adopted by the Senate, the text that was read to the members was that of the Bristow amendment as introduced, with the s in place.
After some impassioned debate, the House voted to insist on its version of the amendment. A long impasse ensued—the conference committee of the two houses met 16 times over a span of nine months.
Eventually, the House yielded and concurred in what it thought was the Senate version. But the joint resolution, as printed in the Statutes at Large and submitted to the states, contained the s.
Perhaps the most likely explanation for the hardiness of the surplus s is that the conference committee of the two houses mistakenly used the original print of the Bristow substitute as the raw materials for preparing its report to the House of Representatives, and this may then have served as copy for preparation of the print that was signed by the presiding officers of the two houses and sent to the states.
Senator Bristow was not a member of the conference committee—perhaps this was a consequence of the Republicans' recent shift from majority to minority party. Congress also removed a comma from the amendment, perhaps unintentionally.
The Tucker proposals, as well as the House version of , contain a comma after "election" near the end of the second paragraph of the amendment. The comma was not mentioned in the debates. It is absent from the 17th Amendment: "until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
No reference to the erroneous s has been found in contemporary or modern sources. It is not mentioned in any New York Times news report or in the reports by some other newspapers on the passage of the amendment in Congress. And no reference is made to the error in a lengthy doctoral dissertation on the amendment or in a biography of Senator Bristow.
If the 17th Amendment has one s too many, the 25th has one too few. The first paragraph of section 4 provides that the Vice President, with "a majority. In all of the successive versions of the amendment that were considered by Congress on the way to the final language, "departments" was used consistently until one s disappeared in the final text produced by the conference committee of the two houses and adopted by the House on June 30 and by the Senate on July 6, The lack of an s was therefore an error—the result of hasty work in producing the conference report—rather than congressional intent.
The people on Capitol Hill were certainly trying to produce an error-free text. As the House of Representatives began its debate on the amendment, Emmanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, requested unanimous consent to refer the report, already before the House, back to the conference committee "because of a technical error in copying. Participants in the final congressional action on the amendment noticed the "department" error after both houses had approved the conference report and the joint resolution was ready to be signed by their presiding officers.
There was a brief discussion of the possibility of recalling the joint resolution for reconsideration in each chamber, but Congress was operating under severe time pressures as it worked toward adjournment for the summer, and it was decided that the record of congressional debates and actions on successive versions of the joint resolution made the intent so clear that the missing s could not affect interpretation of the text.
The proposed amendment was therefore allowed to go to the states in its imperfect form. The congressional staff members who had been working on the amendment did not know where the error had occurred but believed it more likely to have happened in the final typing of the conference report than in the typesetting at the Government Printing Office.
The two congressional errors in the Constitution present us with a remarkable symmetry. Each can be blamed on members of a conference committee or the assisting congressional staff, and each involved a wayward s, one incorrectly added to the text of an amendment and one incorrectly removed. The two errors can be expected to remain in all official copies of the Constitution for the foreseeable future—no modern Jacob Shallus or William Hickey seems likely to be able to correct them.
These two errors of Congress or its staff underscore the need for care in the often hectic and high-pressure business of producing Senate-House conference reports. The conference report is renowned as a wayward part of the legislative process, where all the refinements of members' thinking and negotiating can be cast aside as a very few members craft a final resolution of the many issues inherent in the typical legislative product.
Let us hope that any constitutional amendments that come through the congressional process in the future are given the calm and careful attention that is needed to prevent errors, congressional or otherwise. Henry Bain is a political scientist who holds a Ph. He has had a long career in governmental research and consulting and has taught at several universities.
His modern edition of the Constitution will be published in His early research on voting gave the first statistically significant evidence that voters tend to favor the first candidate on the list. He also participated in the planning of the rapid transit systems in San Francisco and Washington, D. For an explanation of the "" error, see p.
For detailed information on the printing process following the Convention's adjournment, see pp. The modern pamphlet edition of the Constitution that closely follows Hickey's earlier print is The Constitution of the United States of America, as Amended. Unratified Amendments. Analytical Index, House Document , Article 10 Constitution of India: Continuance of the rights of citizenship Article 11 Constitution of India: Parliament to regulate the right of citizenship by law Part 3 Constitution of India: Fundamental Rights 31 Article 12 Constitution of India: Definition Article 13 Constitution of India: Laws inconsistent with or in derogation of the fundamental rights Article 14 Constitution of India: Equality before law Article 15 Constitution of India: Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth Article 16 Constitution of India: Equality of opportunity in matters of public employment Article 17 Constitution of India: Abolition of Untouchability Article 18 Constitution of India: Abolition of titles Article 19 Constitution of India: Protection of certain rights regarding freedom of speech, etc.
Article 20 Constitution of India: Protection in respect of conviction for offences Article 21 Constitution of India: Protection of life and personal liberty Article 21A Constitution of India: Right to education Article 22 Constitution of India: Protection against arrest and detention in certain cases Article 23 Constitution of India: Prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour Article 24 Constitution of India: Prohibition of employment of children in factories, etc.
Article 25 Constitution of India: Freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation of religion Article 26 Constitution of India: Freedom to manage religious affairs Article 27 Constitution of India: Freedom as to payment of taxes for promotion of any particular religion Article 28 Constitution of India: Freedom as to attendance at religious instruction or religious worship in certain educational institutions. Article 29 Constitution of India: Protection of interests of minorities Article 30 Constitution of India: Right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions.
Article 31 Constitution of India: Compulsory acquisition of property Article 31A Constitution of India: Saving of laws providing for acquisition of estates, etc Article 31B Constitution of India: Validation of certain Acts and Regulations Article 31C Constitution of India: Saving of laws giving effect to certain directive principles Article 31D Constitution of India: Saving of laws in respect of anti-national activities Article 32 Constitution of India: Remedies for enforcement of rights conferred by this Part Article 32A Constitution of India: Constitutional validity of State laws not to be considered in proceedings under article Article 33 Constitution of India: Power of Parliament to modify the rights conferred by this Part in their application to Forces, etc.
Article 34 Constitution of India: Restriction on rights conferred by this Part while martial law is in force in any area. Article 35 Constitution of India: Legislation to give effect to the provisions of this Part Article 35A Constitution of India: Saving of laws with respect to permanent residents and their rights.
Article 38 Constitution of India: State to secure a social order for the promotion of welfare of the people Article 39 Constitution of India: Certain principles of policy to be followed by the State Article 39A Constitution of India: Equal justice and free legal aid Article 40 Constitution of India: Organisation of village panchayats Article 41 Constitution of India: Right to work, to education and to public assistance in certain cases Article 42 Constitution of India: Provision for just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief Article 43 Constitution of India: Living wage, etc.
That was like the specter of doom. And now we have a constitutional right to marriage equality. It's really just a question of getting people more aware of what the ERA even is. One of the reasons for opposition was abortion, and to this day there are legislators who have called this the abortion-on-demand amendment. That issue as a cultural divider has not gone away.
But I think it's a real myth to say that this amendment is really being proposed for the purpose of legalizing abortion. That's simply not true. We have a right to abortion choice, to choose abortion under Roe vs. And there are actually a number of very strong anti-choice — they call themselves pro-life — advocates who are strongly supportive of the ERA.
In these some years since, a lot of laws have been passed to make women and men equal in the public stage, in access to all sorts of jobs. In California an equal pay law was passed a year or so ago. So what is left in that gap between what is actually law now and what the Equal Rights Amendment would do? While there may be less of a gap in a state like California, that has passed a lot of state protections, the ERA would protect all women, and men, in the United States, across the country, whatever state they live in.
Not every state has those protections, and in many cases, when you look at legislative protections, there are a number of loopholes or limitations. I think that there is a patchwork quilt, as I call it, of protections in place.
But they're constantly being eroded by court interpretation. The MeToo movement has raised consciousness, to use an old feminist phrase. It's not an accident that all of that immediately predates the MeToo movement.
It just shows you the power of speaking out. And what the ERA does now is give a legal framework to some of that. Maloney], and she certainly made that link, that the ERA is a really concrete fix to the big problems that we're having, and that having left women out of the Constitution years ago has helped to create a culture of second-class citizenship in which women are treated in certain ways with complete impunity.
And the ERA could play a tremendous role in helping to change that more quickly. Ronald Reagan took it out of the party platform; it had been in there and it was the first party to put it in the platform. And sadly, the Republicans took it out under Reagan, but before that, there had been a lot of Republican support.
There was [former First Lady] Betty Ford, and there were at least three Republican presidents who actively supported it including Ford, Eisenhower, and Nixon. Are you going to key your campaign around that centennial? We hope to see it in the Constitution before that. When women got the right to vote in , pretty much immediately all the women in the suffrage movement turned around and put the ERA into Congress in Already a subscriber?
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