This time, he can either endorse the amendment or call a referendum on the issue.
A Republican Congress endorsed the amendment giving women the vote in 1919, and 80 percent of the state legislatures that approved it were Republican-controlled.
Labour MP Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) endorsed the amendment, naming a series of fatal stabbings in her constituency in recent years.
The President had endorsed the amendment as well as a similar version, sponsored by Senator Paul Simon, an Illinois Democrat, which cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.
The group also paid for 600,000 telephone calls to likely voters, featuring the recorded voice of Jim Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director and Oklahoma native who endorsed the amendment.
More than two dozen retired senior military officers, including Colin L. Powell and John M. Shalikashvili, two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, endorsed the amendment, which would ban use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in United States government custody.
Former president Bill Clinton has urged people to vote against Amendment 1 in recorded telephone calls, while evangelist Billy Graham, who has a stretch of road named after him in North Carolina's largest city, Charlotte, has endorsed the amendment in full-page newspaper ads.
Nonetheless, Newt Gingrich has endorsed the amendment in a bid to recapture the old magic for this year's midterm elections.
The Republican Party platform had, as yet, failed to include a similar plank, though Lincoln endorsed the amendment in a letter accepting his nomination.
Newly elected U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant (a Republican) strongly endorsed the amendment, calling it "a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day".
The military leaders said they were forming a committee to amend the constitution and set the rules for popular referendum to endorse the amendments.
