I AM EMBARRASSED TO REPORT I got one wrong in the U.S. Citizenship Test. Twenty-seven Amendments? I thought it was twenty-three. (BTW my fave alternate choice: among the answers for "What ship brought the Pilgrims to America?" was c. Titanic.)

Let's look at the Amendments I overlooked:

AMENDMENT XXIV. Anti-poll tax. Now I am embarrassed.

AMENDMENT XXV. Presidential succession. This came up after Agnew's resignation, then Nixon's. Congress was empowered to create an Act in 1947 that laid out the succession in offices subordinate to the VP's. The bad news is, Rummy's #7.

AMENDMENT XXVI. 18-year-old vote. Fat lot of good it's done us. Though after Vietnam I guess it was necessary.

AMENDMENT XXVII. Congressional raises. This one doesn't go far enough. Had I and my confidant, elementary justice, our way, the Amendment would look more like this.

Most Interesting Amendment: XI. "The action of the Supreme Court in accepting jurisdiction of a suit against a State by a citizen of another State in 1793 provoked such angry reaction in Georgia and such anxieties in other States that at the first meeting of Congress following the decision the Eleventh Amendment was proposed by an overwhelming vote of both Houses and ratified with, what was for that day, 'vehement speed.'" According to the University of Missouri at Kansas City, "The Eleventh Amendment was a response to the Supreme Court's unpopular decision in Chisholm v Georgia, in which the Court ordered Georgia to pay two South Carolina residents a debt the Court found was owed them.  Georgia legislators were so outraged by the decision that the passed a law declaring that anyone who attempted to carrry out the Court's mandate would be hanged with benefit of clergy!" Over time, interpretations of this Amendment expanded to prevent a citizen from citing Federal statutes to sue his own state; this was relaxed a bit in a 1908 case (again per UMKC) when the Supremes determined that "if a state official violated the Constitution he can't be acting on behalf of a state, which can only act constitutionally.  Thus, state officials -- but not states -- might be sued when they violate the Constitution, even when they do so in the name of the state." Later decisions -- even unto the 1990s -- get even murkier ("...Seminole and Printz extended constitutional protection to states sued in their own STATE courts for federal law violations. Clearly, as the Court recognized, this result is not dictated (or even supported) by the language of the Eleventh Amendment.  Instead, the Court concluded that the English common-law notion of sovereign immunity -- reaching even suits against sovereigns in their own courts -- was implicitly adopted by the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution"). In other words, states' rights ain't dead; look for the next comeback tour in a jurisdiction near you.

Fave Amendment: Numero Uno.