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Changing the Constitution
section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate
legislation.
Our Twenty-Sixth Amendment confers the right to vote on all persons
who are eighteen years of age or older. The Amendment applies to State
as well as national elections.
q . a m e n d m e n t x x v i i (1992)
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
The Bill of Rights, as originally proposed in 1789 by the First Congress,
contained twelve rather than ten amendments. The amendments were
arranged by James Madison, then a member of the House of Representatives, not in order of importance or preference, but according to the order of the provisions of the Constitution they were intended to modify;
for Madison’s original plan, soon to be rejected by the House, was to incorporate the amendments into the constitutional text.
Roger Sherman of Connecticut, who had served with Madison as a
delegate to the Philadelphia Convention, led the opposition to Madison’s
plan. Incorporation of the amendments, he argued, would destroy the integrity of the document, necessitating a new draft of the Constitution
every time a new amendment was added. ‘‘We ought not to interweave
our propositions into the work itself,’’ he said, ‘‘because it will be destructive of the whole fabric.’’ The basic principles of legal draftmanship
applicable to statutory law, he reasoned, apply as well to the fundamental law: ‘‘when an alteration is made in an act, it is done by way of supplement.’’ Moreover, continued Sherman, Madison’s plan was not consistent with the democratic theory of the Constitution. ‘‘The Constitution
is an act of the people,’’ he reminded his colleagues, ‘‘and ought to remain entire. But amendments will be the act of the State governments.’’
The House agreed and adopted Sherman’s principle of construction. This
vote set the precedent for all future exercises of the amending power.
Of the twelve amendments proposed, the first two dealt with Congress rather than with individual rights. The first, a reapportionment