Instead, time ran on until June 8, 1953, when the court, unable to reach any decision on which a majority of the court could agree, set the case for reargument on five questions. Two of the questions were technical in nature: Assuming it were decided that segregation in itself violates the Fourteenth Amendment, how should decrees be formulated? How should the cases be handled on remand to the lower courts? The other three questions went to the very heart of American constitutional law. _Question 1: What evidence is there that the Congress which submitted and the State legislatures and conventions which ratified the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated or did not contemplate, understood or did not understand, that it would abolish segregation in public schools?_ The Supreme Court posed this first question, in theory at least, for one reason only: Its object was to determine whether the power to operate racially separate schools ever had been prohibited to the States _by the Constitution_; for if this power had not been prohibited to the States by the Constitution, it was theirs to exercise respectively, for good or ill. (It was conceded that the power never had been prohibited to them by any law of the United States adopted pursuant to the Constitution). Obviously, nothing in the Constitution possibly could prohibit this power to the States except Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. This section imposes three prohibitions on the States: (1) No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; (2) nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; (3) nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.