Creating the Bill of Rights

Creating the Bill of Rights

Multiple Choice

Amendment means..

• change

• new

Multiple Choice

how many amendments are there to the constitution

• 10

• 5

• 27

For all his hopes, John Hancock never got to be president. By a narrow vote, Virginia did ratify the Constitution. In the first presidential election, held in 1789, George Washington became the nation's first president. John Adams of Massachusetts became the vice president.

When the first Congress met that year, no one seemed in much of a hurry to amend the Constitution. Representative James Madison, however, did not forget the promises made during the ratification debate. Originally, he had opposed adding a bill of rights to the Constitution because such a listing seemed unnecessary to him. However, Thomas Jefferson helped change his mind. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson argued that “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on Earth . . . and what no just government should refuse.”

Multiple Choice

How many rights does the bill of rights have?

• 1

• 5

• 10

• 28

Debate and Approval in Congress

 While Congress debated other issues, Madison sifted through nearly 100 proposed amendments. He chose those that seemed least controversial, or least likely to cause conflict, and presented them to Congress on June 8, 1789.

Debate and Approval in Congress

Critics jumped on Madison's proposals as meaningless “milk-and-water” cures for imaginary problems. The debate that followed was, in Madison's words, “extremely difficult.” As months dragged on with no agreement, he wrote that the task had become a “nauseous project.” Still, he persevered until Congress approved 12 amendments.

Ratification by the States

 Under the Constitution, three-quarters of the states must ratify an amendment before it can become law. The states rejected the first two amendments, which dealt with the size of congressional districts and congressional pay raises. Both amendments were considered unnecessary. By 1791, the required number of states (nine) had approved the other ten amendments. Together, these ten amendments form the Bill of Rights.

Bill of Rights: a formal listing of the basic rights of people in the United States

Ratification by the States

When Madison first proposed the Bill of Rights, some people saw his amendments as useless “paper barriers” against abuses of government power. For more than 200 years, however, his “paper barriers” have proven far stronger than even Madison might have hoped.

Multiple Choice

The Bill of Rights contains the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

• true

• false

Multiple Choice

Who took the lead in making sure the Bill of Rights was eventually included in the Constitution?

• Hamilton

• Madison

Multiple Choice

What is the Bill of Rights?

• a document that replaced the Constitution as the supreme law in the United States

• a document that details how to make constitutional amendments

• a formal listing of the basic rights of people in the United States