What is the 27th Amendment?

The 27th Amendment reads: 'No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.' Its purpose is straightforward: any act of Congress that changes the pay of senators and representatives -- whether raising or lowering it -- cannot take effect until after the next general election of the House of Representatives. Because House elections occur every two years under Article I, the maximum delay between a voted pay adjustment and its effective date is under two years. The mechanism is a democratic accountability check: a member who votes for a pay raise and then loses the next election will never benefit from it; one who wins re-election will. The amendment does not cap congressional compensation or require any particular procedure for setting it, only bars immediate effect.

The amendment was drafted by James Madison and proposed by the First Congress on September 25, 1789, as part of a package of twelve articles sent to the states for ratification. Ten of those twelve articles were ratified by December 15, 1791, and are collectively known as the Bill of Rights. The congressional pay article -- listed as Article the Second in the original twelve -- and an apportionment article (Article the First, still unratified today) fell short. By the close of the 1791 ratification window, only six of the then-fourteen states had ratified the pay article: Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware, Vermont, and Virginia. Ten of fourteen states were required for ratification at that time -- the six-state total was far short. Critically, the proposal carried no expiration date. Ohio ratified in 1873 and Wyoming in 1978, bringing the total to eight, but neither action attracted broad attention and thirty-eight ratifications were needed from the now-fifty states to meet the three-fourths constitutional threshold.

The revival came from an unexpected source. In 1982, Gregory Watson was a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin. While researching a paper on the Equal Rights Amendment -- which had failed in 1982 under a congressionally imposed seven-year ratification deadline -- Watson discovered the 1789 congressional pay article in a library and recognized that, unlike the ERA, it carried no expiration date. He argued in a paper submitted for a state and local government class that the article remained legally available for ratification by three-fourths of the current fifty states. His teaching assistant gave the paper a C. Watson appealed the grade through the professor and department, but it was not changed. He then channeled his disagreement into action: beginning in 1982, he wrote letters to every state legislature in the country urging ratification of the dormant article. Maine ratified on April 27, 1983, as the ninth state. Colorado ratified in 1984 as the tenth. Additional states followed through the late 1980s and into 1992 as Watson's campaign gathered momentum and media coverage. Michigan ratified on May 7, 1992, as the 38th state, clearing the three-fourths constitutional threshold from fifty states. The Archivist of the United States, Don W. Wilson, certified ratification on May 18, 1992. Congress passed a concurrent resolution formally accepting the ratification on May 20, 1992. The University of Texas at Austin later reviewed Watson's case and changed his grade to an A in 2017.

The legal validity of the ratification was disputed by some constitutional scholars. The central objection was a lack of contemporaneity: the ratifying states of 1992 and the proposing Congress of 1789 had no shared political moment, and the argument ran that a constitutional amendment requires something like a living national consensus rather than piecemeal state acts scattered across two centuries. The Supreme Court had addressed a related ratification question in Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 (1939), arising when Kansas sought to ratify the Child Labor Amendment years after first rejecting it. A plurality of the Court held that whether prior rejection bars a later ratification, and whether an undue delay voids a pending proposal with no deadline, are nonjusticiable political questions -- matters for Congress to resolve under its constitutional authority, not for courts. Under the Coleman political question doctrine, Congress's acceptance of the 27th Amendment ratification in May 1992 was conclusive and nonreviewable. No court has since invalidated the amendment on contemporaneity grounds, and it has been in force as the final article of the U.S. Constitution since May 18, 1992.

For the 2028 presidential election and the broader political landscape, the 27th Amendment carries three areas of significance. First, any congressional pay bill -- whether a cost-of-living adjustment, a raise tied to executive compensation, or a reduction -- cannot take effect until the next House election cycle following its passage; candidates' and incumbents' positions on federal compensation reform and congressional self-governance are constrained by this mechanism. Second, the Coleman v. Miller political question doctrine that underpins the amendment's ratification applies to any future Article V dispute: whether a state may withdraw a prior ratification, whether Congress may retroactively attach a deadline to a pending proposal, and whether a decades-old proposal remains legally available are questions courts have declined to decide and Congress resolves. Third, the still-unratified Article the First -- the congressional apportionment amendment proposed alongside the Bill of Rights in 1789 and never ratified -- remains technically open under the same no-deadline reasoning that Watson applied to the pay amendment, a legal curiosity that occasionally resurfaces in apportionment debates.