The Twenty-seventh Amendment: Limiting Congressional Pay Raises

When James Madison submitted his proposals for a Bill of Rights in 1789, he included a provision that prevented members of Congress from voting themselves a pay raise before the voters had a chance to kick them out of office for doing so. This amendment was approved as one of the twelve amendments submitted to the states on September 25, 1789.

Only ten of these were ratified in 1791, and they became known as the Bill of Rights because they mainly protected individual rights. However, Congress had not established an official time limit for ratification of the 1789 amendments. During the 1980s, more and more states ratified the amendment limiting congressional pay raises, and it became the Twenty-seventh Amendment in 1992-the longest ratification in U.S. history.

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 1982, during his sophomore year, Gregory Watson wrote a paper for a class at the University of Texas. He argued that since the congressional pay raise amendment proposed in 1789 contained no time limit, it still could be ratified by the states. Watson discovered that after six states had ratified the amendment by 1791, Ohio had ratified it in 1873 and Wyoming in 1978.

Watson’s instructor gave him a “C” on the paper, maintaining that the amendment was a dead letter. And, based on Supreme Court doctrine, the instructor was right. The Court had ruled that, even though Article V included no time limits in the amendment process, ratification by the states should be “sufficiently contemporaneous… to reflect the will of the people in all sections at relatively the same period.”

But after Watson conducted a ten-year national campaign, more than three-fourths of the state legislatures had ratified the amendment in 1992.

The archivist of the United States, who by statute had the responsibility for certifying the amendment as ratified, did so in May 1992. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions agreeing with that decision, although some questioned whether four other amendments proposed without time limits might still be valid. Those included the 1789 amendment on the reapportionment of Congress, the 1810 amendment on titles of nobility, the 1861 Corwin Amendment to allow slavery in the states, and the 1924 amendment banning child labor.