This substitute contained the gist of the Blaine amendment, and also changed the provision which proposed to deprive the President of his constitutional prerogative of commandership-in-chief of the army. While the bill was thus made a less brutal measure, and in one respect a less unconstitutional measure, it still rested upon a very shaky foundation so far as constitutional law was concerned, and it was opposed by all the Democratic Senators. It was passed, however, by a large majority, every Republican who voted voting in favor of it. [Sidenote: The substitute in the House.] [Sidenote: The Senate substitute rejected by the House.] [Sidenote: The bill as finally agreed upon.] When it was returned to the House of Representatives for concurrence, the Radical Republicans developed a most hostile opposition to the changes which had been made by the Senate. They claimed that the Senate bill proposed to bind future Congresses by pledges which the existing Congress had no right to make and no power to execute, and that it also proposed to use the rebel element of the population of the South in the work of reconstructing loyal "State" {118} governments. After a long and acrid debate, the House rejected the Senate's substitute by a union of Democratic votes with the votes of the Radical Republicans. This result and the manner of its attainment so frightened the Republicans, however, that they quickly came to an understanding among themselves in the House, and with their party colleagues in the Senate, and passed the Senate's substitute, so amended as to prevent disloyal men, as designated in the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, from voting for delegates to a reconstruction convention, or being delegates therein, or being officers in any so-called "State" government before the admission of the Senators and Representatives from that "State" into Congress, and so amended further as to pronounce all professed civil governments existing in any of the late so-called Confederate States, except of course Tennessee, provisional only, until Senators and Representatives from the same should be admitted to seats in Congress, and subject, as provisional governments, to the paramount authority of the United States which should control them, and might supersede or abolish them at any time. The Senate also accepted these amendments, and on the 20th of February the bill was placed in the hands of the President. [Sidenote: The contents of the bill as passed.]