This Proposed Amendment Would Have Made Divorce Illegal

Thanks to the structure of the United States government and the functions of Congress, amendments to the country's constitution can be proposed at any time. Indeed, nearly 12,000 separate amendments have been proposed since the country's founding. For a proposed amendment to be passed, however, it must win enough congressional approval to enter the constitutional ratification process.

Typically, most proposed amendments never make it past the congressional committees in which they are proposed. It's a tough sell, considering states have only ratified 27 amendments in the last 250 years. The amendments that don't make it run the gamut from reasonable to ridiculous. Let's take a look at some of the proposed amendments that never passed. Some of them are truly absurd. (For political controversy, discover the most atrocious moments in Donald Trump's political career.)

To compile an article about proposed amendments that never made it through Congress, 24/7 Tempo consulted a range of news, judicial, and political publications including Constitutioncenter.org, law.justia.com, and Newsweek.com. To confirm aspects of our research, we used sites like the Vanderbilt Law Review and the New York Times.

One wonders what was going through Rep. Lucas M. Miller's mind when he proposed an amendment to change the nation's name to "The United States of Earth." If you're thinking it was a peaceful, universal kind of sentiment, you couldn't be more wrong. As the representative from Wisconsin reasoned in 1893, "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." Suffice it to say, his idea didn't go over too well. He failed to be nominated to the House for a second term.

In February 1863, Presbyterian layman John Alexander proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to recognize "the rulership of Jesus Christ and the supremacy of the divine law." To get his idea to the government, Alexander headed the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution. With over 35,000 signatures in support of the Christian Amendment, it seemed like a shoo-in. Instead, people including notable agnostic speaker Robert Ingersoll, fought back, suggesting the amendment would undermine the First Amendment and potentially penalize nonbelievers. The movement eventually faded, but other "Christianizing" efforts came forth in subsequent decades.

The late 1920s Wall Street crash and subsequent Great Depression made people weary of high earners. Rep. Wesley Lloyd of Washington state echoed these sentiments when he proposed an amendment in 1933 to apply income over a million dollars to the national debt. If it passed, the country's landscape might have looked very different.

Proposed in 1875, the Blaine Amendment would have banned the transfer of public funds to any religious organizations or purposes. At the time, the Catholic Church maintained a stronghold of parochial schools in the United States and anti-Catholic sentiment was high. The amendment failed to pass, but many states later adopted similar provisions regarding the use of public funds for religious reasons.

Perhaps one of the wildest proposed amendments that failed to pass involved the transformation of the U.S. government entirely. In 1876, the country was reeling from the Hayes-Tilden contested presidential election debacle. Seeking to provide a solution, a private citizen named Augustus Wilson wrote to Congress suggesting an amendment to get rid of the president and replace it with a Roman Empire-style, three-leader triumvirate. His idea fell on deaf ears.

On March 2, 1861, the outgoing 36th United States Congress proposed an amendment that would have shielded slavery from the constitutional amendment process and prevented interference by Congress. It was sort of a last-ditch effort to appease Southern states and prevent the country from the Civil War. While it passed Congress, it failed to ratify in most states and failed to prevent war. Remarkably, it was never given a ratification deadline, so the Corwin Amendment could still technically be adopted by state legislatures.

Another amendment that passed Congress but failed to be ratified is the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment. On Aug. 22, 1978, the U.S. Congress proposed an amendment to give the District of Columbia full representation in Congress, the Electoral College System, and the Congressional Amendment process. It would have effectively ended the 23rd Amendment, which gave D.C. the same number of electoral college votes as the least populous state. It needed the ratification of 38 states. By the time it hit its seven-year time limit on Aug. 22, 1985, however, only 16 states had ratified it. The District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment may seem like a pittance in terms of legislation, but if it had passed, it would have put the power to pass amendments squarely in the hands of D.C.

The earliest proposed amendment that failed to pass was The Dueling Ban Amendment of 1838. This came about after Reps. Jonathan Cilley and William Graves settled their beef through a genteel sense of firepower. After they met near the Anacostia River bridge in Washington, D.C., the men lined up 80 paces from each other and fired. Both missed, however. Worried at the tone this might set for future disputes, the U.S. Congress proposed an amendment to prohibit any person involved in a duel from holding public office.

They may not have realized it at the time but the proponents of the Human Life Amendment eventually got their wish. Proposed in 1973, the Human Life Amendment sought to overturn the Roe vs. Wade court ruling and outlaw abortion. It failed to pass, but proponents attempted a remarkable 330 more proposals in the years to come. Only the Hatch–Eagleton Amendment reached a formal floor vote before being rejected by the Senate in the summer of 1983. It took until 2022 for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade via Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. This left it up to individual states to regulate access to abortion. (For other events from the era, discover the biggest American headlines from 1970.)

One of the more recent proposed amendments is The Single Subject Amendment, which would limit the content of bills submitted to Congress to a single subject. Consequently, it would limit budget earmarks, hamper the ability of legislators to trade favors, and discourage the use of excessively long omnibus spending bills that often featured riders slipped in at the last minute. Ideas similar to the Single Subject Amendment have been swirling in the background for a long time; Brannon Denning and Brooks R. Smith first proposed a similar amendment in a law journal in 1999. While over 40 states have single-subject rules in their constitutions, the federal government does not. A variation of the Single Subject Amendment was introduced by Rep. Tom Marino of Pennsylvania in the 115th Congress from 2017-2019, but there's no update on its ratification.

For over 60 years, an amendment proposing government control over people's ability to divorce their spouses routinely made its way to Congress. These took similar forms beginning in the 1880s but the 1921 version of this amendment makes its intentions clear: "Congress shall have power to establish and enforce by appropriate legislation uniform laws as to marriage and divorce…" While it counted notable supporters, including President Theodore Roosevelt, it failed to ever reach confirmation. (For notions that deserve rest, explore Daylight Saving Time and other antiquated ideas we should retire.)