that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired.[62] The proposed provisions regarding ineligibility would dishonor the government by annulling the pardons granted by the President. Further, the program contradicted itself, since it proposed to treat the southern communities as states, in submitting a constitutional amendment to them, while at the same time imposing on them conditions to which a state could not lawfully be subjected. After a debate of which these two opposing reports are a convenient summary, Congress adopted the program of the committee. The joint resolution, changed into a form embodying the present Fourteenth Amendment, was passed on June 13, 1866.[63] The two bills proposed were taken up, but Congress adjourned without bringing them to a final vote, leaving the South to be regulated during the recess by the Civil Rights Act, and by an act, passed over the President's veto on July 16, embodying in a less drastic form the provisions of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill which had failed in February.[64] When Congress met in December, 1866, the same voluminous mass of reconstruction proposals and declaratory resolutions appeared in both houses as at the last session. But the denunciation of the President and of the Johnson governments was more emphatic in these bills and resolutions, as well as in the debates. Sumner proposed a resolution to this effect: That all proceedings with a view to reconstruction originating in executive power are in the nature of usurpation; that this usurpation becomes especially offensive when it sets aside the fundamental truths of our institutions; that it is shocking to common sense when it undertakes to derive new governments from the hostile populations which have just been engaged in armed rebellion, and that all governments having such origin are necessarily illegal and void.[65] Another resolution proposed that the committee of the House on territories be instructed to take steps for organizing the districts known as Virginia, North Carolina, etc., into states. Cullom said in a speech: During the last session of this Congress we sent to the country a proposed amendment to the Constitution.... The people of the rebel states by their pretended legislatures are treating it with scorn and contempt.... It is time, sir, that the people of the states were informed in language not to be misunderstood that the people who saved this country are going to reconstruct it in their own way, the opposition of rebels to the contrary notwithstanding.[66]