Bill of Rights Drafted
James Madison drafted amendments to a constitution he had argued did not need them. The Federalists' position in 1787 had been that a bill of rights was unnecessary and dangerous — unnecessary because the federal government had only enumerated powers, and dangerous because listing some rights would imply that unlisted ones did not exist. The ratifying conventions did not accept it. Several states ratified with recommended amendments attached, Virginia and New York only just approved, and two states stayed out entirely. Madison had promised amendments during his own election campaign and concluded that the promise had to be kept if the constitution was to be secure. He went through some 200 proposals from the state conventions, discarded the ones that would have altered the structure — which is what the opposition principally wanted — and produced nineteen concerning individual liberties. Congress reduced them to twelve and the states ratified ten in December 1791. They cover religion, speech, press, assembly and petition; arms; quartering; searches; due process, double jeopardy and self-incrimination; jury trial; excessive bail and cruel punishment; and, in the ninth and tenth, the two answers to the Federalist objection — that the enumeration shall not deny others retained by the people, and that undelegated powers remain with the states. They applied only to the federal government until the Fourteenth Amendment, and the courts spent the twentieth century applying them to the states one at a time. One of the two rejected articles was ratified in 1992. Madison called the enterprise a nauseous project in a private letter and carried it through anyway, which is the most useful thing to know about how it came to exist. He was answering a political obligation rather than a philosophical conviction.
- Year: 1789 CE
- Category: Political
