happy Bill of Rights Day.
This is the day the US Constitution got its first ten amendments. Pretty important ones, too.
Originally, the Bill of Rights that Congress sent to the states had twelve amendments, not ten.
One of them never won ratification.
Another got there in the end, but it took a little over two centuries.
This amendment was written by the “Father of the Constitution” himself, James Madison, and it was originally intended to be the Second Amendment.
The text states that any law that adjusts compensation for members of Congress cannot take effect before an election; the idea was that if voters didn’t approve of a raise that lawmakers had given themselves, they could vote those lawmakers out of office.
But it takes approval from three-fourths of the states to add an amendment to the Constitution, and this one didn’t get that level of support in its original run.
Once in a while, states would ratify the amendment as a protest against the latest congressional pay raise, but since there were also new states coming into the Union, those votes were mostly symbolic.
And along the way, the US developed a custom that an amendment had to be ratified by the right number of states within seven years to join our Constitution.
But in 1982, Gregory Watson, a student at the University of Texas, learned about the old proposal.
He wanted to see if finally get ratified, and he found that there had never been a time limit associated with this amendment.
Watson’s term paper on the issue only got a C, but his campaign to get the amendment into the Constitution was an A+: over the next decade he and others would convince enough states to approve the amendment and get it over that three-fourths mark.
Some members of Congress questioned whether a process that started in the 1790s could really keep going until the 1990s. Could a vote from a state two centuries earlier still stand?
But the Archivist of the United States thought it could, and since Congress had given him the power to certify ratification, the US Constitution got a 27th Amendment.
As for that other amendment in the original Bill of Rights, the one that never got ratified: that would have set the size of the House of Representatives at one member for every 30,000 people.
Instead of 435 Reps, we’d have like 6,000.
If you’re into that kind of thing, you could try to get that one ratified too.
Japanese Students Built A Flying Bicycle That Actually Lifts Off The Ground Powered Only By Pedaling
byu/EducationalOne5313 ininterestingasfuck
Students at Osaka Public University in Japan just built a bicycle… that flies.
The bike’s pedals power a big fan in the rear, which helps its giant wings get off the ground.
But if you don’t keep pedaling, you don’t keep flying.
Which is a good argument for not skipping leg day at the gym.
27th Amendment or Bust (The American Prospect)
Japanese Students Successfully Build a Flying Bike That Gets off the Ground by Pedaling (My Modern Met)
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Photo from National Archives at College Park – Still Pictures, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
