DELAWARE did not REJECT Article the First, but rather “postponed”. This is likely due to John Vining, (who served on the committee of communication, made up of three members of the House, who worked in coordinating the versions in the House and Senate), discovering the scrivener’s error in that article. He would have been intimately familiar with the text as it was to have appeared.
As recorded by Senator Oliver Ellsworth ofCt., the last-minute change from “less” to “more” was to have taken place in the “last line but one”. Instead, however, a clerk’s error occurred when Beckley incorrectly transcribed this as “in the last place of the last line”, so, while the engrossed “copies” contain language that makes the last clause of Article the First mathematically improbable, the had the change in the correct place, it would set a floor of 40,000 constituents and a ceiling of 50,000 constituents, once a total of 200 members was reached.
This would only be an interesting historical footnote, had not the ratification vote of Connecticut been discovered in the Fall of 2011 in their State Archives. With Connecticut’s ratification, including Article the First, we have 12 of the then 15 States at Kentucky’s ratification. The line for ratification, once crossed, cannot be “un-crossed”. It requires a new Constitutional Amendment to remove an existing amendment, hence the “repeal of prohibition”, rather than just striking it out. It is a further peculiarity of Constitutional Law that an amendment is ratified when it is voted in the State Legislature – “reporting” is not a requirement, to prevent cowains and usurpers from diluting, obfuscating, or otherwise thwarting the will of the people.
As Article the First passes the threshold for Ratification, it MUST be applied in this decennial Apportionment. A lawsuit has been filed to compel recognition of this historical fact, AND to compel the application of the “Apportionment Amendment”. That suit has oral arguments scheduled for 09/14/2012 in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The Docket Number is 12-1171, and the suit is entitled “LaVergne v. Bryson, et al”. Contained in the “Final Brief and Addendums” filed by Eugene M. LaVergne, a New Jersey Civil Rights attorney and expert in Constitutional Law, contains all of the supporting documents, including the original report from Congress, penned in Ellsworth’s own hand. There has been significant institutional resistance to this suit, and it has so far been successfully kept from the American Public, to the point where the censorship of our history includes the National Archives having pulled one of their own press releases from their web-site…that press release is a further exhibit in the “Final Brief and Addendums”, which can be viewed at NationalTruth.org, a private web-site hosting the documents until a better venue can be obtained. The gist of the press release, which offended those listed among the defendants, was that the language of Article the First allowed for a Congress of over 6000 with this apportionment. In the language of the engrossed copies, that is not so, BUT, in the actual language of what was voted, it says EXACTLY that. The story of the “Scrivener’s Tale” is one of error, omission, and Machiavellian deceit.
Article the First, as it was ratified in 1792, must be recognized, and, as a part of the Constitution, must be adhered to. Every single member of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of our Government are compelled to take an “Oath of Office” before beginning their tenure in public service. Those oaths all contain language compelling that they preserve, protect, defend, or otherwise uphold the Constitution of the United States- AS IT IS, not as they might like it to be. Will they?
~~~~Frederick John LaVergne for Congress, NJ Third Congressional District~~~~