The 27th Amendment was ratified on May 7, 1992, when Michigan became the 38th state to approve it and pushed the total past the three-fourths threshold required by Article V.1U.S. House of Representatives. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment That date came more than 202 years after the First Congress first proposed the amendment in 1789, making it the longest ratification process in American history.2National Constitution Center. Interpretation: The Twenty-Seventh Amendment The rule it added is short: no change in the pay of Senators and Representatives can take effect until after the next election of the House.3Congress.gov. Constitution Annotated – Twenty-Seventh Amendment
Why It Took 202 Years
James Madison introduced the pay provision in 1789 as part of a package of twelve proposed amendments drawn from more than 200 suggestions submitted during the ratification debates.4U.S. Capitol – Visitor Center. Senate Revisions to the House Version of the Bill of Rights, September 9, 1789 Ten of the twelve were ratified quickly and became the Bill of Rights. The pay proposal, labeled “Article the second” in the list sent to the states,5National Archives. Bill of Rights (1791) picked up six state ratifications by 1792 and then stalled.
The reason it never died is a detail the First Congress left out. Later amendments typically carry a seven-year window for state action, and any proposal that misses the window simply expires. The 1789 pay amendment had no such deadline attached, so it remained legally open even as it fell out of public memory. Ohio ratified it in 1873, possibly as a protest against a congressional pay increase that had drawn public outrage, and Wyoming followed in 1978.6Prologue: Pieces of History. A Record-Setting Amendment Two ratifications in roughly a hundred years shows how forgotten the proposal had become.
The College Paper That Revived It
The modern push began with a term paper. In 1982, Gregory Watson, a sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, came across the unratified proposal while researching a government course and realized that the missing deadline meant it was still pending before the states. His professor disagreed, graded the paper a C, and called the idea a dead letter.7National Constitution Center. How a College Term Paper Led to a Constitutional Amendment
Watson began writing to state legislators across the country urging them to bring the amendment up for a vote. States started acting one by one, and the campaign accelerated through the late 1980s as public frustration over congressional pay grew. Ratifications came in rapid succession by the early 1990s. The University of Texas retroactively changed Watson’s grade to an A in 2017.7National Constitution Center. How a College Term Paper Led to a Constitutional Amendment
Michigan Crosses the Three-Fourths Line
Article V requires three-fourths of the states to ratify any proposed amendment.8National Archives. Constitutional Amendment Process With 50 states, that meant 38. Michigan’s ratification on May 7, 1992 brought the total to exactly 38 and made the amendment part of the Constitution the moment the vote was recorded.1U.S. House of Representatives. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment Several additional states ratified afterward as a show of support, but they were not needed.
Certification and the Dispute Over Validity
Federal law requires the Archivist of the United States to publish an adopted amendment along with a certificate listing the ratifying states once official notice is received.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 1 U.S. Code 106b – Amendments to Constitution On May 18, 1992, Archivist Don W. Wilson proclaimed the 27th Amendment ratified as of May 7, acting on the advice of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel.10Legal Information Institute. Ratification of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment
Some members of Congress questioned whether an amendment proposed more than two centuries earlier could still be validly ratified, and argued that Wilson should have waited for congressional approval before signing. Wilson responded that the votes of three-fourths of the states added the amendment to the Constitution on their own, and that his signature was a ministerial act.11National Archives. The National Archives’ Role in Amending the Constitution Both chambers passed concurrent resolutions on May 20, 1992 affirming the ratification, which Wilson had called legally unnecessary but which put Congress on record.12GovInfo. Constitution of the United States – 27th Amendment
What the Ratified Amendment Does
The text bars any law changing congressional pay from taking effect until an election of Representatives has intervened. In practice, its bite is narrower than it sounds. Since 1989, the Ethics Reform Act has set congressional salaries by automatic cost-of-living adjustment, and federal courts have held that those annual adjustments do not trigger the amendment because the underlying “law” is the 1989 Act itself, which took effect after the seating of a new Congress in January 1991.13Legal Information Institute. Scope of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment The scenario the amendment clearly reaches is the one Madison had in mind: a sitting Congress voting itself a raise cannot collect on that vote until voters have had a chance to weigh in.