The Twenty-seventh Amendment

The amendment provides that no law varying the compensation for the services of senators and representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives has intervened. James Madison included it among the amendments he proposed in 1789, to keep members of Congress from voting themselves immediate raises, and Congress sent it to the states on September 25, 1789, as the second of twelve proposed amendments. Only six states ratified it in the eighteenth century, and it was largely forgotten, though Ohio ratified it in 1873 and Wyoming in 1978 in protest of pay raises.

In 1982 Gregory Watson, a University of Texas student, wrote a paper arguing the amendment was still pending because Congress had set no deadline, and he received a C. He then led a campaign that persuaded state legislatures to ratify it amid public anger over congressional pay raises. Michigan became the thirty-eighth state on May 7, 1992, and the Archivist certified the amendment on May 18, 1992, 202 years after it was proposed. Both houses of Congress voted to accept it despite questions about the long gap.

Courts have held that automatic cost-of-living adjustments for members do not violate the amendment, because the law creating them was enacted before an intervening election. Member pay has been frozen at $174,000 a year for most members since 2009. The No Budget, No Pay Act of 2013 withheld lawmakers' pay in escrow rather than cutting it, to avoid conflict with the amendment. The amendment's ratification also strengthened the view, reflected in Coleman v. Miller, that Congress decides whether a ratification is timely.