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On this date (18-May-1992) the 27th Amendment was offically certified by the Archivist of the US (Don W. Wilson) as ratified.Certain members of Congress were miffed and took Wilson to task for acting without Congressional acceptance of the proposed amendment.The riddle is this… a) what is unique about the amendment? b) who originally proposed it? and c) what allowed Wilson the authority to act without Congressional action?
Riddle answereda. It took 203 years for the Amendment to be ratifiedb. James Madisonc. 1 USC Section 106b allows the Archivist to certify Amendments to the Constitution. The full text is:
Whenever official notice is received at the National Archives and Records Administration that any amendment proposed to the Constitution of the United States has been adopted, according to the provisions of the Constitution, the Archivist of the United States shall forthwith cause the amendment to be published, with his certificate, specifying the States by which the same may have been adopted, and that the same has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States.
Spot on! the thing I really thought was cool and stressed to the kids was that this one was one of the original 12 amendments Madison proposed… another 10 becoming the Bill of Rights and one concerning the number and apportionment of representitives fizzled. However, according to Colman v. Miller (1939) this one, too, could be ratified. 😮
That is interesting. I wonder if the archivist ratified it as some kind of joke…otherwise, why would he do it unilaterally?
That is interesting. I wonder if the archivist ratified it as some kind of joke…otherwise, why would he do it unilaterally?
Scout is 100% correct on c); United states Code Title 1, Sec 106b (quoted) gives the Archivist statutory authority to to certify… the Colman case indicates that
nay[any] amendment ts]y[/shat does not have a ratification deadline (ala the ERA; deadline 30-June-1982) may be ratified by the states at any time… this is why the one that fizzled could come back, no deadline.The passage of the 14th Amendment was tossed up in the struggle over this one too. That however supported Wilson as Sec. of State Seward had similarly certified the 14th before Congress.But why did he do it? We know that he could do it (i.e. he had the authority), but that didn't mean that he had to do it. So I'm wondering if decided to ratify it simply “because he could” or so that he could tell his grandkids, have his name in the history books (which he got), etc.
I'd submit that it was required… Scout quoted this before, I've bolded the main reason for my opinion.
Whenever official notice is received at the National Archives and Records Administration that any amendment proposed to the Constitution of the United States has been adopted, according to the provisions of the Constitution, the Archivist of the United States shall forthwith cause the amendment to be published, with his certificate, specifying the States by which the same may have been adopted, and that the same has become valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of the Constitution of the United States.
Shall means he has no choice.
I have to go with Wally here. Once the requisite number of states has ratified the Amendment the Archivist has no choice but to certify it. He is doing no more than announcing that the conditions of its inclusion in the Constitution have been met. It is part of the Constitution as soon as the last required state to ratify it does so. He is just putting the proper punctuation on ratification. It is not as though were he to fail to certify it, it would not still be a part of the Constitution.I think of it kind of like monarchical succession was explained to me. There are little particles called Kingons and as soon as the old king dies they instantly appear in his successor with no time lag. There could be little Constitutionons and as soon as the last state ratifies the Amendment they take the new Amendment and ass it to the Constitution with no time lag. The Archivist is just acknowledging what is already a fact. A simplistic analogy I know, but for me at least, it is kind of effective.
This is the relevant information that I was missing, and which is why I was confused:
The proposed amendment was ratified by Wyoming in 1978 as a protest to a Congressional pay raise,[2] but the proposed amendment was largely forgotten before University of Texas at Austin undergraduate student Gregory Watson wrote a paper on the subject in 1982.[3] He started a new push for ratification with a letter-writing campaign to state legislatures.[1] The amendment became the Constitution's Twenty-seventh Amendment when it was ratified a decade later on May 5, 1992 by the Alabama Legislature, the thirty eighth state to do so.
So the archivist didn't all of a sudden certify this out of the blue (as was my initial thought), but did it within two weeks of Alabama's ratification. It was actually Wyoming that made a decision to ratify it out of the blue. This makes sense now.
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