Article Five of The United States Constitution - Rescinding A Ratification

Rescinding A Ratification

The validity of a ratification that a state first grants and then later purports to rescind, and of the subsequent ratification of an amendment which that state previously rejected and then later assented to, was addressed by Congress in 1868 when Secretary of State William H. Seward issued a proclamation that what we know today as the Fourteenth Amendment was properly ratified and a part of the Constitution. Seward's proclamation noted that Ohio and New Jersey lawmakers had reversed themselves and purported to rescind. Further, Seward's proclamation questioned the validity of those reversals. Shortly thereafter, both houses of Congress adopted a concurrent resolution likewise declaring the Fourteenth Amendment as having been duly ratified and listing Ohio and New Jersey among the states approving it. While Ohio and New Jersey purported to withdraw their earlier ratifications, three other states that had previously rejected the amendment then reversed themselves and proceeded to ratify it. In Coleman v. Miller (1939), the Supreme Court declared the question to be non-justiciable, leaving the issue to Congress and accepting the precedent set by Congress' actions some 71 years earlier with respect to the Fourteenth Amendment. It would therefore appear that states may not undo prior ratifications of amendments, although they may ratify an amendment which they had previously rejected. However, Congress is not subject to the doctrine of stare decisis, so a future Congress could simply ignore this precedent. The issue of rescission became important again during the 1970s when the legislatures of four states adopted resolutions purporting to repeal their previous ratifications of the Equal Rights Amendment.