Ben Sheehan Quotes

Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with their corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend.

As mentioned earlier, the 27th Amendment was one of 2 unratified amendments written by Madison that Congress sent to the states with the Bill of Rights. But here’s the story of how it was ratified. Unlike modern amendments, the proposed amendments in the Bill of Rights didn’t have expiration dates. So in 1982, 191 years after it failed, a sophomore political science student at the University of Texas–Austin named Gregory Watson noticed that some states had ratified it, but that it hadn’t expired. So he wrote a paper about the failed amendment and got a C from his TA. He appealed the grade, but his professor upheld the C. Pissed off, Watson started writing letters to various state legislatures. They noticed and began ratifying the amendment. Ten years after his C, Alabama became the 38th state to ratify it, giving it the ¾ (38) needed to add it to the U.S. Constitution. In 2016, Watson’s paper was resubmitted for a grade change, with a request of an A+ for having caused an actual constitutional amendment. The University of Texas–Austin honored the change, but only gave the paper an A.

America is actually the only democracy (representative or otherwise) on earth where residents of the capital city don’t have voting representation in the national legislature.