In 1866, members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction introduced the Fourteenth Amendment into the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. Several speakers indicated that the force of the new amendment would be to protect basic or fundamental citizen rights against adverse action by state governments, and would allow Congress for the first time to protect such rights against such state action. The clause that would do this was the privileges or immunities clause: “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”