Angie Craig: “let me conclude the time on our side by looking at what past Congresses have done when they proposed amendments to the…”

“let me conclude the time on our side by looking at what past Congresses have done when they proposed amendments to the Constitution. What the Senator is suggesting in his amendment is that the first Congress would have been able to anticipate that in the first amendment we would have said that yelling ``fire'' in a crowded theater is against that amendment. But that is not what the first Congress said about the first amendment, because they did not know at the time. They did not understand, or they could not anticipate, what a court would suggest. What this is saying is that in the second amendment we would have said it was intended to keep guns out of the hands of juveniles. That is not what our Founding Fathers said at the time. They did not know. Or we could have said the fourth amendment required reading aspects of the Miranda rights into the decision. Or maybe we would have said, in a post-Civil War Congress, that we knew 100 years subsequent how we would anticipate all of the civil rights that would have come under the Constitution. No, I do not think that was intended, and I do not believe that any Congress can anticipate what a constitutional amendment will do beyond the clarity of the language of the Constitution itself, and that is that we will have a balanced budget amendment in a period of time.…”