Wednesday 25 September 2019

codex

On this day in 1789, the US Congress approved twelve articles of amendments to the Constitution addressing guarantees of personal liberties and rights. Articles three through twelve became the Bill of Rights, ratified by member states. The second article was eventually ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.
The Congressional Apportionment Amendment (originally titled Article the First) is still pending and proffers a mathematical formula for setting the number of representatives in the lower house by population, one per every thirty thousand citizens. Congress had generally followed this convention by statue up until 1911 when the number of districts (though not their boundaries) were set at 435, with six additional non-voting members, American Samoa at-large, the District of Columbia at-large, Guam at-large, Puerto Rico at-large, the US Virgin Islands at-large, and the Northern Mariana Islands at-large, who mostly caucus with the Democratic party. A seat for the Cherokee Nation has also been established but has never been filled. The Philippines and Cuba also sent resident commissioners to Congress—also with no voting rights but well before the present scheme was established in the early 1970s, the exclusion based on the fact that these colonies accorded no citizenship rights and therefore retained the right secede from the Union, unlike the incorporated lands