No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Congress proposed the Congressional Pay Amendment to the states in 1789 along with eleven other amendments, including the ten proposals that would later become the Bill of Rights.1 By the end of 1791, only six of the then-existing fourteen states had ratified the Pay Amendment,2 leaving it short of the eleven state legislatures needed to constitute a three-fourths majority for purposes of ratification at the time.3 In 1873, the Ohio legislature ratified the Amendment to protest a congressional pay raise.4 Thereafter, the compensation amendment lay dormant until the late twentieth century.
In 1982, Gregory D. Watson, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote about the Congressional Pay Amendment in a paper for a political science class.5 Watson argued that the states could adopt the Amendment because Congress had not imposed a deadline on its ratification.6 Watson’s instructor gave him a grade of ‘C’ on the paper, reportedly telling him that the Amendment was a “dead letter.” 7 Thereafter, Watson mounted a campaign to obtain the state legislatures’ ratification of the Amendment.8
From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, more than 30 state legislatures ratified the Amendment, responding to public opposition to congressional pay increases.9 On May 18, 1992, National Archivist Don W. Wilson, on the advice of attorneys in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, proclaimed the Amendment to have been ratified on May 7, 1992.10 Although the Constitution does not require Congress to confirm that an amendment has been ratified, the House and Senate each subsequently passed a concurrent resolution recognizing that the Amendment had been adopted.11
-
Footnotes
- 1
- Bill of Rights (1791), Nat’l Archives (Sept. 20, 2022), https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/bill-of-rights ( “No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.” ).
- 2
- Richard B. Bernstein, The Sleeper Wakes: The History and Legacy of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, 61 Fordham L. Rev. 497, 532–33 (1992).
- 3
- See id.
- 4
- Id. at 534. During the nineteenth century, in response to various state petitions, Members of Congress introduced resolutions proposing amendments to the Constitution that sought to address the compensation issue. See Cong. Pay Amend., 16 Op. O.L.C. 85 (1992).
- 5
- Bernstein, supra note 2, at 536–37.
- 6
- Id.
- 7
- Id. In 2017, Watson’s grade on the paper was changed from a ‘C’ to an ‘A’. Matt Largey, The Bad Grade That Changed The U.S. Constitution, NPR (May 5, 2017), https://www.npr.org/2017/05/05/526900818/the-bad-grade-that-changed-the-u-s-constitution.
- 8
- Bernstein, supra note 2, at 537.
- 9
- Id. at 537–38. Watson later discovered that Wyoming ratified the Amendment in 1978. Id. at 537. For additional information on how Members of Congress are compensated, see, Ida A. Brudnick, Cong. Rsch. Serv., Report 97-1011, Salaries of Members of Congress: Recent Actions and Historical Tables (2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RS/97-1011/86; Ida A. Brudnick, Cong. Rsch. Serv. Report 97-615, Salaries of Members of Congress: Congressional Votes, 1990-2022 (2022), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/97-615.
- 10
- See Certification of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Relating to Compensation of Members of Congress, 57 Fed. Reg. 21187, 21187 (1992). Under federal law, the Archivist of the United States is responsible for certifying that a proposed constitutional amendment has been ratified after receiving official notice from three-fourths of the states that they have adopted the amendment in accordance with the Constitution. See National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984, Pub. L. No. 98-497, title I, §107(d), 98 Stat. 2280, 2291 (codified at 1 U.S.C. § 106b). For more information on the authentication of amendments to the Constitution, see ArtV.4.2.3 Authentication of an Amendment’s Ratification.
- 11
- See H.R. Con. Res. 320, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. (1992); S. Con. Res. 120, 102d Cong., 2d Sess. (1992).