Bill of rights
The British Bill of Rights is one of the basic documents of British constitutional law. It was signed in 1689 by William of Orange and Mary II in return for their being affirmed as co-rulers of England and Ireland by the British Parliament after the Glorious Revolution.
The basic tenets of the Bill of rights were:
- Englishmen possessed certain civil and political rights that could not be taken away.
- Certain acts of James II were specifically named and declared illegal on this basis.
- The flight of James from England in the wake of the Glorious Revolution amounted to abdication of the throne.
- Roman Catholics could not be king or queen of England.
- William and Mary were the successors of James.
- Succession should pass to the heirs of Mary, then to Princess Anne (later Queen Anne) and her heirs.
The bill was later supplemented by the Act of Settlement in 1701.
The Bill of Rights was a major step in the evolution of British government towards parliamentary supremacy, and the curtailment of the rights of the monarchy. In doing so it largely settled the political and religious turmoil that had convulsed Britain and Ireland in the 17th century.
The Bill of Rights is the name given to the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. When the Constitution was submitted to the state legislatures for ratification, many of its opponents claimed that the Constitution did not include a bill of rights because the document was an aristocratic scheme to remove the rights of Americans. Supporters, known as Federalists, assured Americans that a Bill of Rights would be added by the first Congress.
After the Constitution was ratified, the first Congress met. Most of the delegates agreed that a Bill of Rights was needed and most of them believed that the same rights should be enumerated. The task of drafting the Bill of Rights fell to James Madison. It had been decided earlier that the Bill of Rights would be added to the Constitution as amendments (the list of rights was not included in the text of the Constitution because it was feared that changing the document's text would necessitate the rather painful process of re-ratifying the Constitution).
The Bill of Rights includes rights such as freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly. It also includes a clause assuring the American people that the bill of rights should not be interpreted as a list of all rights belonging to Americans, but rather a list of the most important rights.
Twelve amendments were originally proposed in 1789, but two failed to pass. The eleventh was ratified in 1992 as the 27th amendment to the constitution; it restricts the ability of Congress to raise its own pay. The twelfth is theoretically still pending, but unlikely to ever pass (it deals with setting the size of Congress).
The Bill of Rights passed the House easily. When it was sent to the Senate, an amendment was removed that forbade states from interfering with the rights of the people. Since records of the meetings of the Senate are not available to the public, no one can say for sure why this amendment was removed. The fourteenth amendment, passed in 1868, has been widely interpreted by courts to do exactly that. The other amendment regulated the size of the House.