He Got a Bad Grade. So, He Got the Constitution Amended. Now He's Getting the Credit He Deserves.

KUT 90.5 ^ | MAR 13, 2017 | MATT LARGEY

[Mean Daddy]

With everything that’s going on in politics these days, it helps to remember the power that we have as individuals to make change. Examples of this are far too few, of course.

But there is one that stands out. And you’ve probably never heard it.

The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics.

“I'll never forget this as long as I live,” Gregory says. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”

[Mean Daddy]

Slacker

[JayGalt]

Excellent article, thanks for posting.

[FamiliarFace]

Lol. Enjoyed the article very much.

[Publius]

Technically, this is not an article about a Convention of States for proposing amendments to the Constitution. But in various Article V threads, versions of this fascinating story come up. This is the first time I've seen the entire story in print, and it's an object lesson.

Madison proposed 17 amendments as his Bill of Rights project. Congress reduced those 17 to 12. A good 10 of them were slam-dunked through the ratification process. This particular amendment proposal, known at the time as "Madison's Salary Grab Amendment," languished for two centuries. This is the story of how it was finally ratified.

[ifinnegan]

“Sharon was blown away. And in that moment, she felt redeemed.”

That really isn’t the message she should have received.

[BradyLS]

From the story:

“Many people have said you never know what kind of effect you're going to have on other people and on the world. And now I'm in my 70s, I’ve come to believe that's very, very true. And this is when it really hit me because I thought to myself, ‘You have, just by making this fellow a grade he didn't like, affected the U.S. Constitution more than any of your fellow professors ever thought about it and how ironic is that?’”

This lady has convinced herself that she was the butterfly that started the hurricane. Never mind all the work her "mediocre" student did to write research a paper and to revive a forgotten amendment. She was the prime mover cuz someone else gave a damn about the constitution.

That's the hubris of academia for you!

[abigkahuna]

What a great story and a testament as to the power of a single citizen.

[barmag25]

Awesome story

[Repeal The 17th]

Very interesting.

[posterchild]

:)

[PAR35]

Come on. You can’t expect anyone on the faculty at UT Austin to know anything about the Constitution. It would probably be easier to find someone who had memorized Mao’s Little Red Book than someone who was a Constitutional Scholar.

[Publius]

As I recall, there are a few other amendment proposals that passed both Houses of Congress by the necessary two thirds margin and still sit out there awaiting ratification like the 27th Amendment did.

One was the Titles of Nobility Amendment. If that were ratified, Rudy Giuliani would have to renounce his British knighthood, given for getting MI-5 up to speed after 9/11, or renounce his American citizenship.

Another was an amendment to preserve slavery in the states in which it already existed, proposed to keep the South in the Union in the early days of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment superseded that.

There is the Child Labor Amendment, superseded when Congress and the Supreme Court decided that federal and state governments could legislate working conditions during the New Deal.

There is also another Madison amendment from the Bill of Rights project sitting out there too.

[Kellis91789]

I’m guessing she is a liberal. Their thought processes are not like ours.

[fungoking]

The article left out the role a democrat controlled congress played in getting this ratified. The no warning, late night, voice vote to raise their own pay back in the late 80’s or early 90’s fueled the outrage that pushed many states to vote on this.

[PeteyBoy]

So a PHD who gave a guy a “C” grade on a paper he eventually got an “A+” on wonders why she can’t get a job.

Got it.

[zeugma]

Good article. I knew a little about the 27th amendment, but this filled in a lot of gaps.

[unlearner]

Awesome story. Thanks for posting it.

[PGR88]

Mommy, what’s “The Constitution???”

[BobL]

There are some other ‘orphan’ amendments from back then. My favorite one states something like “the average Congressional district could not exceed 50,000 people” (rather than the 750,000 we’re up to now). That would mean 6,600 members in the House of Representatives. Try being a lobbyist when you need 3,300 people to win a vote. In other words, the districts would be both small enough so that Representatives could pretty much know every politically active person in their district, and would be so numerous that they would be ‘unmanageable’ by party leadership - in other words, they’d really REPRESENT THE PEOPLE.

I’d love to see it approved, along with crappy pay and term limits...make Congress part time, and have them live in dorms.

[21twelve]

Heh - she didn’t even grade his paper - a student aide gave him the “C”. She “looked at” the paper (glanced?) and didn’t change anything - she didn’t DO anything. I hope she never taught again.