f, as the one
or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress;
Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One
thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first
and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that
no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage
in the Senate.

Amendment of the Constitution

SCOPE OF AMENDING POWER

When this Article was before the Constitutional Convention, a motion to
insert a provision that "no State shall without its consent be affected
in its internal policy" was made and rejected.[1] A further attempt to
impose a substantive limitation on the amending power was made in 1861,
when Congress submitted to the States a proposal to bar any future
amendments which would authorize Congress to "interfere, within any
State, with the domestic institutions thereof, * * *."[2] Three States
ratified this article before the outbreak of the Civil War made it
academic.[3] Many years later the validity of both the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Amendments was challenged because of their content. The
arguments against the former took a wide range. Counsel urged that the
power of amendment is limited to the correction of errors in the framing
of the Constitution; that it does not comprehend the adoption of
additional or supplementary provisions. They contended further that
ordinary legislation cannot be embodied in a constitutional amendment
and that Congress cannot constitutionally propose any amendment which
involves the exercise or relinquishment of the sovereign powers of a
State.[4] The Nineteenth Amendment was attacked on the narrower ground
that a State which had not ratified the amendment would be deprived of
its equal suffrage in the Senate because its representatives in that
body would be persons not of its choosing, i.e., persons chosen by
voters whom the State itself had not authorized to vote for Senators.[5]
Brushing aside these arguments as unworthy of serious attention, the
Supreme Court held both amendments valid.

PROCEDURE OF ADOPTION

Submission of Amendment

When Madison submitted to the House of Representatives the proposals
from which the Bill of Rights evolved, he contemplated that they should
be incorporated in the text of the original instrument.[6] Instead the
House decided to propose them as supplementary.[7] It ignored a
suggestion that the two Houses should first r