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I was fascinated when I learned that the 27th Amendment was included in the original proposal for the 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.
Unlike the original 10 amendments this one, along with one other was not ratified. Apparently we thought better of that choice after 200 years when Congress was taking on more power and we realized that having one more check on there power would always be a good thing.
4 replies on “Constitutional Amendment 27”
I don’t understand what this one is for???
Essentially if Congress votes for a pay raise for themselves we have the opportunity to vote those particular representatives out before the raise can take effect. Of course Congress gets around this by making their raises automatic unless they vote to suspend the pay raise for the year.
I had the same thought when I learned this was with the original Bill of Rights. When I think of an agrarian society with representatives truly functioning as citizen reps then this makes sense to protect those representatives and senators from economic reprisals–similar to life-time judges. But by 1992, when they had become professional politicians, this becomes incredibly self serving. Should we really be surprised?
The point in 1992 was not to protect them from having their salaries lowered – we had history to show that this was unlikely to happen. When the amendment passed in 1992 it was meant as a check on allowing Congress to raise their own salaries.