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Congress has proposed thirty-three amendments to the Constitution since 1789. Only twenty-seven of these amendments, however, have been ratified and therefore become part of the Constitution. Six proposed amendments failed to reach the required approval of three-quarters of the states.
1789
During the debates over whether to ratify the Constitution itself in
1787 and 1788, state conventions had suggested hundreds of changes. Several
of the state conventions ratified the Constitution because they were promised
that a bill of rights would be amended to the Constitution.
Madison drafted a bill of rights consisting of seventeen provisions during the first Congress in 1789. Congress passed twelve of these seventeen by the required two-thirds margin.
Ten of these twelve proposed amendments were ratified by the state legislatures by 1791. These are the amendments we now call the Bill of Rights. One of these amendments was not ratified until 1992, over two hundred years after it was proposed, becoming the Twenty-seventh Amendment.
This leaves one of these original twelve proposed amendments that has not been ratified. Notably, this would have been the first amendment to the Constitution if it had passed in 1791. The amendment would have allowed Congress to have the power to regulate the number of members of the House once the proportions went beyond 100,000 persons per Representative.
1811
Congress proposed an amendment that would strip the citizenship of
any American who receives a title, pension, or office from a foreign nation
without the consent of Congress.
1861
Two days before Abraham Lincoln+AJI-s inauguration, members of Congress
in favor of preserving slavery were able to get two-thirds of both the
House of Representatives and the Senate to propose an amendment barring
the Federal government from interfering with slavery. If this amendment
had been ratified by the states, it would have become the Thirteenth Amendment.
However, within weeks of the passage of the proposal, the Civil War began
with the assault on Fort Sumter. What became the Thirteenth Amendment was
a proposal to eliminate slavery in the United States.
1924
Congress proposed an amendment that would allow Congress the power
to "limit, regulate, and prohibit" child labor within the United States.
By 1937, twenty-four states had ratified the amendment and twenty-two had rejected it. Rhode Island and Alabama had taken no action. The chief opponents to the amendment were the National Association of Manufacturers and the publishers of newspapers (who were dependent on child labor to sell newspapers on the streets of major cities).
From "Children Wanted," Survey Graphics v. 26, no. 1 (January, 1937)
p. 10.
1972
In 1972, Congress proposed an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that read,
"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of sex." Congress allowed seven
years for the states to ratify the proposal before the proposal would expire.
Twenty-eight states ratified the amendment in the first year. Opponents of the measure quickly became organized into a "Stop ERA" movement. By the time of the expiration date in 1979, only thirty-five of the thirty-eight required states had ratified the amendment. Three of these thirty-five had rescinded their earlier ratification. Congress extended the ratification deadline until 1982, but no further states ratified the amendment.
1978
Congress proposed granting the District of Columbia representation
in Congress as if it were a state. This amendment proposal expired in 1985.
Residents of the District of Columbia may vote in Presidential elections
(since the passage of the Twenty-third Amendment in 1961), but still have
no representation in Congress.
