Bill of Rights?

Question

Describe the process by which the Bill of Rights was added ti the Constitution.



All answers are appreciated! Thanks!!

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights ...hope this will help

Answer 2

Most state had their constitutions adopted during the Revolution, and they had included a clear declaration of the rights of all people. At that time most believed that no constitution would be considered complete without a declaration of personal rights.

The Federalists would not have obtained ratification iof the constitution if they had notpromised to include a bill of rights.

See the link below for a full version located at the end of the article;
""[19 Aug.]

The House then took into consideration the amendments to the Constitution, as reported by the Committee of the Whole.

Mr. Sherman renewed his motion for adding the amendments to the Constitution by way of supplement.

Hereupon ensued a debate similar to what took place in the Committee of the Whole. . . ; but, on the question, Mr. Sherman's motion was carried by two-thirds of the House; in consequence it was agreed to.""
from; Annals of Congress. The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States. "History of Congress." 42 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales & Seaton, 1834--56

Answer 3

At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison had not believed that a bill of rights was required for the new government. However, during the ratification process, several states had called for a bill of rights, and Madison felt it was his obligation, his duty, to propose one. Madison also clearly felt a need to control the amendment process by taking leadership of the effort. New York, when it ratified the Constitution, had called for another constitutional convention, which was now clearly provided for in the Constitution. By drafting a Bill of Rights, Madison headed off that possibility. He stated quite openly:

"I should be unwilling to see a door opened for a re-consideration of the whole structure of the government, for a re-consideration of the principles and the substance of the powers given; because I doubt, if such a door was opened, if we should be very likely to stop at that point which would be safe to the government itself. . ."

It is clear that Madison truly thought that a bill of rights was not necessary except to mollify those who thought it was required, to preclude another constitutional convention and to encourage the final two states to ratify the Constitution (see Speech). In later years, his letters revealed no great pride of authorship. In a letter of 1821 he referred to "those safe, if not necessary, and those politic, if not obligatory, amendments." In his speech to Congress the best he could say of a bill of rights was that it was "neither impropoer nor absolutely useless." This is, certainly, faint praise.

One the other hand, Madison was enough of a politician to appreciate the usefulness of an appeal to the Bill of Rights. Less than a decade later, he specifically refers to the 1st and 10th amendments in the Virginia Resolutions protesting the Alien and Sedition Acts.

While proposing the amendments, Madison reviewed many of the arguments that had been raised for and against a bill of rights. The speech is in that respect a very good recapitulation of the arguments.

There are certain things to note in Madison's speech. He proposed that the actually body of the Constitution be revised by insertion, deletion or revision of articles and clauses. In practice, however, amendments are listed at the end of the Constitution and footnotes (or now links) note what portions of the body have been amended. If Madison had had his way, most of what we now know as the Bill of Rights would be inserted into the first article of the Constitution following the prohibition on bills of attainder. It is important to note that Madison does not seem to using the same numbering of articles of the Constitution that we use today. When he references the third article (judiciary) or the fifth article (amendment process), his numbering is consistent with ours. However, when he refers to the 2nd article it seems very clear that he means what we today would call the the first article. In an attempt to clarify matters we have added the appropriate article number in parenthesis whenever Madison seems to be using a different system.

Several of Madison's proposals were never approved by Congress. His very first suggestion (see Speech), a prefix to the Constitution did not secure approval by Congress. Today, many would argue that the substance of the Madison's proposed prefix is inherent in the Constitution and not necessary (which, of course, is exactly what Madison believed).

In what was to become the second amendment, the right to bear arms, Madison proposed a recognition of the rights of what we would call conscientious objectors: "no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person." (see Speech) Today, we recognize the rights of conscientious objectors, but they have not received the explicit Constitutional protection that Madison desired.

Madison also proposed three restrictions on the states: "No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases." (see Speech) It is interesting to speculate that Madison may have considered these three the most critical rights. These restrictions were not approved by Congress, and thus the Bill of Rights in its original intent was to restrict only the federal government. Eventually more extensive restrictions were imposed on the states by the 14th amendment and its interpretation by the Supreme Court (see Amendment XIV).

Madison also proposed an explicit statement recognizing the separation of powers, although not using that phrase (see Speech). This statement was not included in the Bill of Rights, and to this day the Constitution has no explicit mention of the separation of powers. Nonetheless, the separation of powers is held by all to be implicit in the Constitution, an interpretation butressed by Madison's discussions in the Federalist Papers.

At Madison's prompting, Congress proposed twelve amendments, which they called "articles," in 1789. Articles three through twelve were ratified by three-fourths of the states by 1791 and became amendments one through ten or the Bill of Rights. The first two articles, however, met a different fate.

Madison's proposal concerning the apportionment of the House of Representatives was the first of the twelve articles proposed by Congress to the states, but was never ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states. It reads as follows:

"Article the first: After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.''

The sense of the amendment is to forbid Congress from reducing the number of Representatives. Now that the House has 435 Representatives, there seems to be little need for the amendment.

An article forbidding an increase in Congressional pay until an election had intervened was the second of the twelve approved by Congress (see Speech). However, it was not ratified with the other amendments and thus is not in the Bill of Rights. Forty years later, a disappointed Madison, writing his "Autobiography" in the third person (see Sources), still lamented the failure of this amendment:

"He highly disapproved of public bodies raising the wages of themselves, and declined receiving the additions made by the Legislature of Virginia to the wages of member whilst he was one. In this he was not singular. He was much surprised and disappointed at the incompleting of the Ratification of the prohibitory article proposed to the Constitution of the U.S. . ."

In 1992, after another 160 years, the article was finally ratified by three fourths of the states: it became the 27th amendment more than 200 years after it was approved by Congress.

Nonetheless, most of Madison's proposals were adopted either in substance or in totality. Links are provided between Madison's proposed changes and the Constitutional amendments which embody these changes. There is, in fact, very little in the Bill of Rights that is not included in Madison's proposal. There is also very little in Madison's proposal that was not itself included in earlier documents. As an extreme example we can compare Section 9 of the Virginia Declaration of Rights with the corresponding proposal of Madison and with the eighth amendment of the Bill of Rights.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted in 1776 with primary credit given to George Mason. While Madison's "shall not be" is more elegant and more forceful than Mason's "ought not to be," the similarities outweigh the differences. However, great originality is not a virtue in politics. The tried and true stated well is reassuring. What Madison was to say years later about Jefferson and the Declaration could easily be adapted to Madison and the Bill of Rights:

"Nothing can be more absurd than the cavil that the Declaration contains known and not new truths. The object was to assert, not to discover truths, and to make them the basis of the Revolutionary act. The merit of the Declaration, therefore, could only consist in a lucid communication of human rights, in a condensed enumeration of the reasons for such an exercise of them, and in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion, and to the spirit of the American people."

Letter to Thomas Jefferson, September 6, 1823.