ROTA, THE, the standing council of constitutional revision, twelve former senators chosen by lot from a ballot of the eligible, sitting as the Frame's own guardian and interpreter in the narrow but real sense that no amendment touching the Senate, the Assembly, or the Council of State may take effect without its concurrence. Its name is borrowed, with a deliberateness this Commonwealth has never troubled to disguise, from the club that met nightly at Miles's Coffee-House (q.v.) in the winter of 1659, where James Harrington (q.v.) first expounded, to whoever would listen over the coffee, the scheme of rotation in office from which both the club and the council that succeeded it took their common title. The Legislator himself, true to the purity for which this Commonwealth honours him, never sat on the body that bears his club's name; its first bench, seated in 1660, was drawn instead from working senators willing to give up their own seats for the honour of interpreting, rather than making, the law.
The Rota's business is deliberately slow and deliberately rare. It does not sit in continuous session, but is convened as amendments are laid before it, and its twelve members — debarred, by the same statute that created them, from any other public office for the term of their sitting — have generally numbered among the Commonwealth's more senior and less ambitious public men, the honour of a place on the Rota being reckoned, by long custom, a fitting close to a public career rather than a step toward anything further. Sir Henry Vane (q.v.) took a seat among the twelve on leaving the Lord Presidency in 1666 and is remembered, by the Rota's own surviving minute-books, as having brought to its deliberations exactly the same patient unwillingness to concede more than the argument strictly required that had served him at the Settlement.
The body's authority has been tested rather less often than its constitutional weight might suggest, chiefly because the amendments generally laid before it — the widening of the franchise, the enlargement of the Senate under the Second and Third Frames (q.v.), the relaxation of the Assembly's own debating bar — have arrived, by the time they reach the Rota, already settled in substance by years of prior argument in the Senate and the country, leaving the twelve chiefly the office of confirming that the letter of the amendment matches the intention everyone concerned has already agreed upon. Whether this reflects the Rota's own wisdom in declining to obstruct what the nation has plainly decided, or merely the good fortune of an institution that has never yet been asked to stand against a popular current running the other way, is a question this contributor, who has sat through two of its sessions as an interested observer rather than a member, does not think the Rota's own history has yet supplied the evidence to answer. (E. H. V.)