The Twenty-seventh Amendment
Changes to congressional pay
Delays any change in congressional pay until after the next House election, ratified 202 years after it was proposed.
Ratified 1992 · 3 minute read
Published by Quasi-Legal Institute · Report an error
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
In plain language
Changes to congressional pay
This covers raises, and also cuts. Any law that changes what members of Congress are paid is covered.
The longest ratification in history
James Madison wrote the amendment in 1789 as part of the package that became the Bill of Rights. Congress sent twelve proposed amendments to the states. Ten were ratified by 1791 and became the Bill of Rights, but this one fell short of the number of states needed. A few more states approved it over the following decades, and then it was largely forgotten.
In 1982, Gregory Watson, an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper arguing the amendment could still be ratified, because Congress had not put a deadline on it. He received a C. He then began a campaign to persuade state legislatures to approve it. Michigan became the thirty-eighth state in May 1992, and Congress voted to recognize the amendment. The university later changed Watson’s grade to an A.
How it works
The amendment does not stop Congress from voting itself a raise. It only delays the raise until after the next House election. In Boehner v. Anderson (1994), a federal appeals court held that the automatic annual cost-of-living adjustment in federal law does not violate the amendment, because members already voted for the formula in a law passed before the adjustment.
The Supreme Court has also said in Coleman v. Miller (1939) that Congress, not the courts, decides whether too much time has passed for an amendment to be ratified, which is why Congress’s decision to accept the Twenty-seventh settled the matter.