Bill of Rights

The United States Constitution was originally adopted at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after the perceived failure of the colonies' first attempt at a foundational document for federal government, the Articles of Confederation. This is important to recall because in many ways the Constitution was written with an awareness of how such documents may fail in practice, and so its drafters included in Article 5 a set of provisions whereby the Constitution itself could be "amended" or changed in order to address anything that was not already covered in the existing text. Article 5 specifies that this may be done by Congress "whenever two thirds of both Houses deem it necessary." Yet there was not a slow and gradual trickle of such proposals -- instead, the first ten amendments that were actually made to the U.S. Constitution were all done at the same time, in 1791. Collectively,...
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