Twelve Failed Constitutional Amendments That Could Have Reshaped American History

 

The United States Constitution had been in effect for little more than a year when Congress first moved to amend it. On September 25, 1789, the legislature sent a dozen proposed amendments to the then-13 states (soon to be 14) for ratification, as the law required. By December 15, 1791, the necessary three-fourths of states had ratified 10 of the 12 amendments, which collectively became known as the Bill of Rights.

Another 17 amendments have been ratified in the 234 years since, for a total of 27. But these measures represent just a tiny fraction of the amendments that have been proposed in Congress over the years—nearly 12,000 to date.

“The U.S. Constitution was intended to be amended,” writes historian Jill Lepore in her new book, We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. However, “almost all efforts to amend the Constitution fail. Success often takes decades. And for long stretches of American history, amending the Constitution has been effectively impossible.”

Most proposed amendments die quietly in congressional committees (if they even get that far), with only a few sent on to the states for ratification. At present, there are six proposed amendments awaiting possible state ratification—one of them dating back to 1789.

Many failed amendments have involved fairly minor administrative matters. But others would have changed the American government in substantial ways and possibly altered the course of history.

Here are a dozen of those failed amendments and what they set out to accomplish.

1. Change the country’s name

In 1866, Missouri Representative George Washington Anderson proposed dropping “United States” from the country’s name and simply calling it “America.” The current name was “not sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere,” he argued, albeit unsuccessfully.

Weighing in from across the Atlantic, the Illustrated London News mocked the proposal as the “verbal appropriation of a hemisphere.”

Just one hemisphere wasn’t enough for Lucas Miller, a first-term representative from Wisconsin. On a single February day in 1893, he introduced 46 bills, one of which would have changed the country’s name to the “United States of the Earth.”

Miller’s rationale, in his own words, was that “it is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it.” Another source suggests that he might also have settled for the “United States of the World.” Miller’s proposal was widely ridiculed at the time, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the congressman didn’t return for a second term.

2. Abolish the presidency!

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Missouri Representative John William Noell suggested abolishing the office of president and replacing it with a three-person executive council elected by separate regions of the country. The proposal would have given each member veto power over the other two.

Even after the Civil War, proposals to abolish the presidency arose from time to time. In 1878, Ohio Representative Milton Isaiah Southard introduced a resolution much like Noell’s, to create a three-person executive council, with one president each for the Western states, the Southern states, and the combined “Eastern and Middle” states. Southard argued that “the people of this country are opposed to monarchy, or the ‘one-manpower’ created by the accumulation of regal power in the hands of one person in the control and direction of their public affairs.”

3. End term limits for presidents

While some proposed amendments have tried to limit how long a president could serve, others have gone in the opposite direction. In fact, since the 1951 ratification of the 22nd Amendment, which set the limit at two terms, legislators have repeatedly attempted to repeal that measure and allow presidents to serve as many terms as they choose.

According to the Congressional Research Service, supporters of term limits believe they serve as “an essential check to the cult of personality and the potential for excessive presidential power.” Opponents maintain that the 22nd Amendment is “inherently undemocratic, in that it prohibits the voters from electing a qualified candidate they favor.”

Although an existing amendment has only been repealed once (when the 21st Amendment, ratified in 1933, repealed the 18th Amendment, which instituted Prohibition), efforts to end or expand presidential term limits continue, including as recently as 2025.

4. Elect the president by lot

Numerous amendments have tried to change how Americans elect their president, but few have been more novel than the proposal put forth by James Hillhouse, a senator from Connecticut, in 1808. He suggested, first, that senators be elected to three-year, rather than six-year, terms, staggered so that one-third of their terms would end each year. The senators whose terms were expiring would then choose a new president from among their ranks, with each drawing a ball from a box. The senator who picked the lone colored ball would become president for one year.

Unusual as Hillhouse’s proposal may have been, he wasn’t the first to suggest a lottery as a means of appointing the president. At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson floated a plan in which a small group of congresspeople, chosen by lot, would gather to make the decision. “It was an inventive idea,” says David O. Stewart, author of The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution, “but nobody thought it was a very good one.”

5. Abolish the vice presidency

In 1897, Herman V. Ames, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, published a list of proposed constitutional amendments dating back to the very beginning of the nation’s history. He recorded seven attempts to abolish the office of vice president, with some critics referring to the position as “superfluous.” One early proponent was none other than Hillhouse, the same man who’d suggested selecting the president by lot.

Similar efforts continued into the 20th century, led by both politicians and other prominent voices. Testifying before Congress in 1975, the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. also called the office “superfluous.” “I know that presidents say ritualistically they are going to give their vice presidents something to do,” he said, “but this never has amounted to much.”

Schlesinger went on to describe the office as one of “spectacular and, I believe, uncurable frustration” for its occupants. “Few vice presidents have survived the systematic demoralization inflicted by the office without serious injury to themselves,” he argued.

6. Add more vice presidents

While some would-be amenders have sought to do away with the job of vice president entirely, others have insisted that what the country really needs is more seconds-in-command.

In 1881, for example, Georgia Representative Nathaniel Job Hammond suggested creating a first, second and third vice president. More recently, in 1964, New York Senator Kenneth Keating proposed splitting the office in two, with an executive vice president and a legislative vice president.

7. Abolish the U.S. Senate

In 1911, Wisconsin Representative Victor Berger, the first socialist to be elected to Congress, introduced an amendment intended to shutter the Senate, calling it “an obstructive and useless body, a menace to the liberties of the people, and an obstacle to social growth.”

With the Senate out of the way, Berger’s amendment would have concentrated all legislative power in the House. Its decisions would be “the supreme law,” the resolution stated, “and the president shall have no power to veto them, nor shall any court have any power to invalidate them.”

Berger must have known that his proposal was purely symbolic, since the process for passing amendments requires Senate approval, and it was highly unlikely that its members would willingly put themselves out of a job.

8. Abolish the Electoral College!

Choosing the American president through the Electoral College rather than by direct vote of the people was controversial from the start. As the historian Ames wrote in 1897, “No part of the Constitution has caused so much dissatisfaction and hence given rise to so many amendments to effect a change.”

A major reason for the dissatisfaction is that the Electoral College vote and the popular vote do not always align, making it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but ultimately lose the election. This has happened five times to date, in the presidential elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016.

Among the many attempts to abolish the Electoral College, the most recent appears to be that of Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen in December 2024. “Americans expect and deserve to see the winner of the national popular vote for any elected office assume the office as its legitimate winner,” he said at the time. “The Electoral College is a vestige of the 18th century, when voters didn’t know the candidates. Today, presidential candidates are widely known and regularly appear on Americans’ phones and television screens.”

One amendment to replace the Electoral College with direct elections did come pretty close to succeeding in 1969, when the House passed it by a 338-to-70 vote. However, the measure died in the Senate.

9. Create a court that could overrule even the U.S. Supreme Court!

Asserting that the U.S. Supreme Court has too often overstepped its authority in striking down state laws, some amendments have proposed creating an even higher court with the power to review and nullify Supreme Court decisions. 

The first of these seems to have been offered in 1867 by Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky, who called for a “tribunal” consisting of one member appointed by each state. Later legislators advanced similar proposals for a court made up of the Supreme Court justices of each state, a concept that came to be known as the “Court of the Union.”

The idea attracted new attention during the 1960s, when dissatisfaction with recent Supreme Court rulings led representatives from Southern states to call for a “Court of the Union.” At least 15 proposals for an amendment to that effect came before Congress between 1963 and 1981.

10. Limit personal fortunes

In 1933, often considered the bleakest year of the Great Depression, Wesley Lloyd, a representative from Washington State, proposed giving Congress the authority to establish a cap on the personal wealth of Americans. Perhaps to soften the blow, he proposed that the limit be set no lower than $1 million (about $25.7 million today). “The only reason there is a widespread poverty,” he told Congress, “is that wealth and the ownership of wealth have become centralized—the only reason many men are too poor is because a few men are too rich.”

11. Allow the American people to vote on wars!

The power to declare war, which the Constitution invests in Congress, has long been a subject of controversy—and attempted amendments. For example, in 1916, the year before the U.S. entered World War I, Representative Denver Samuel Church of California offered an amendment requiring that declarations of war first be put to a popular vote and win the approval of a majority of Americans. He did allow for certain exceptions, such as an invasion of the U.S. by a foreign country. Numerous similar amendments have followed in the years since, particularly in the 1930s, as war in Europe loomed.

12. Make war illegal!

North Dakota Senator Lynn Frazier began a quixotic fight to put an end to war in 1926, with a proposal “providing that war for any purpose shall be illegal, and neither the United States nor any state, territory, association or person subject to its jurisdiction shall prepare for, declare, engage in or carry on war or other armed conflict.” A committed isolationist, Frazier continued to propose such amendments regularly until 1939, before losing his party’s backing in a 1940 primary. The following year, the U.S. entered World War II.

-Smithsonian Magazine, Greg Daugherty | Read More

Greg Daugherty is a magazine editor and writer, as well as a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine. His books include You Can Write for Magazines.

National Archives: 11,000 Failed Attempts to Change US Constitution