For these reasons the committee recommended a joint resolution and two bills. The resolution proposed an amendment to the Constitution forbidding any state to abridge the civil rights of citizens of the United States, or to deny to any person the equal protection of the laws, providing that a state which withheld the electoral franchise from negroes should suffer a deduction from its Congressional representation, and providing that until 1870 all adherents to the Confederacy should be excluded from voting for members of Congress and for Presidential electors. The first of the two bills was to enact "that whenever the above recited amendment [should] have become a part of the Constitution of the United States, and any state lately in insurrection [should] have ratified the same, and [should] have modified its constitution and laws in accordance therewith," then its representatives might be admitted to Congress. The second bill was to make ineligible to office under the United States men who had been prominent in the service of the Confederacy. A minority of the committee took issue with the majority on both its legal and its political views. The states under consideration, said the minority, had never gone out of the Union; therefore, being states of the Union, Congress could not lawfully deprive them of their rights as states. That the Johnson governments were only the machinery of military occupation, set up by the conquering general, was denied. We know [said the minority report] that [the southern states] have governments completely organized, with legislative, executive, and judicial functions. We know that they are now in successful operation; no one within their limits questions their legality, or is denied their protection. How they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are inquiries with which Congress has no concern. A state is under no restriction as to the mode of altering its constitution; if it chooses to receive assistance from the President, or any one else, the validity of the amended constitution is not affected. To the statement of the majority regarding the disposition of the southern people, the minority opposed the high authority of General Grant. In an official report he had said: I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.... [They] are in earnest in wishing to do what they think is required by the government ... and if such a course was pointed out they would pursue it in good faith. The right way in which to deal with the southern people was, then, to conciliate them, as the President had tried to do, not to perpetuate their hostility. If Congress adopted the program recommended by the majority, said the minority, it would repudiate its own solemn declaration made in 1861,