Who's On First?

   Candidate Ted Cruz said the reason the constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, of speech and of the press were embodied in the First Amendment was because the founders thought them the most important.
   However, one would think that a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School who clerked for a Supreme Court justice, served as attorney general for the state of Texas, became a U.S. senator and now aspires to be President of the United States would know well the Constitution and its Amendments.
   In fact, the initial proposed amendments were twelve in number, of which the first two were not promptly ratified. Thus, the proposed Amendment Three, guaranteeing religious rights as well as speech and press rights, became the First Amendment.
   The original lead amendment had to do with apportionment of representatives but was never ratified, and the second proposed amendment related to compensation for members of Congress. It was not ratified until 1992, becoming Amendment 27.
   James Madison proposed all twelve of the initial amendments. The first one was intended to prevent the House of Representatives from becoming too small to matter. It went nowhere, since the Constitution itself mandates that each state shall have at least one representative, regardless of population size.
   Originally, the Constitution stipulated one representative for every 30,000 people, but clearly that would eventually become unwieldy, so in 1911 Congress approved a statute limiting the House to 435 members. It was legally entitled to do  this.
   The second of Madison's proposals would have prohibited Congress from giving itself a pay increase. It could, but the boost would not take effect until the beginning of the next Congress. Again, that didn't happen until nearly the 21st Century.
  So why did candidate Cruz claim the First Amendment was first because the founders thought its guarantees were the most important in the Bill of Rights?
   One can only speculate. Either he didn't know the history of the Constitution -- unlikely for someone of his academic and political background -- or he was using this claim as a ploy to appeal to a certain segment of the electorate, based on the idea that voters were ignorant of the Constitution.