The Volokh Conspiracy
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Today in Supreme Court History: May 5, 1992
5/5/1992: The 27th Amendment is ratified. It was initially proposed in 1789.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
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“Let’s make it harder for politicians to get pay increases”. Yes, that tracks as about the only thing that Republican and Democratic voters might agree on these days. (And even that has the problem that the politicians who would do the ratifying might not agree, for obvious reasons.)
Remarkable story. Which of course Josh doesn’t mention.
“Which of course Josh doesn’t mention.”
Google and Bing exist you know.
He doesn’t want to spend the effort to blog about what he thinks is important, he just wants to pester other people into doing it for him.
I didn’t decide to post about it. Josh is the one who did that.
The Massachusetts legislature found a loophole in pay limits. Base pay is middle class level. Almost everybody gets a bonus for being a party leader or committee chair or co-chair. And a per diem allowance regardless of actual expense or work.
Hey John.
Traveling from the Boston suburbs to the capitol is expensive.
It was swiftly mooted at the federal level, too: They passed a law delegating setting Congressional pay to a panel they controlled, which panel would always give them what they wanted, without any additional legislation. And the Supreme court signed off on the work around, on the basis that no new laws were being passed to raise the pay, so that the 27th amendment has basically never actually done anything.
Not only does the Court give them ‘amendments’ they want, it also spikes amendments they didn’t want.
I’ll bite: what the hell are you talking about?
Does this mean that Congress could vote in October of an even numbered year to increase its pay, made effective during the lame duck period?
Sure. The idea was that they’d have to face the voters before they got the loot.
Could have been better drafted, but that’s true of a lot of the amendments.
This amendment was relatively innocuous, but the next zombie Amendment might not be. We should (but probably won’t) enact a Constitutional amendment to this effect:
“To become law, a Constitutional Amendment must be ratified by the required three quarters of the States within 7 years of submission by Congress.
“Until that three-quarters is reached, a State can rescind ratification by the same method (legislature or convention) that it used to ratify.”
A minor edit:
“
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendmentsAny proposed amendment, without regards to its origin, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, asthe one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress;as specified by the constitutions of each state, provided thatno amendment which may be made prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any manner affect the first and fourth clauses in the ninth section of the first article; and thatno state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. And further provided that ratifications shall expire upon the 7th year unless renewed, and may be rescinded prior to that time by the same mode they were made.(1) Your draft gives me the impression you would allow pro-Amendment States to drag out the ratification process longer than 7 years if they kept renewing their State ratifications. I would oppose that.
(2) Method for States to ratify–
For the 21st Amendment (Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition), Congress specified ratification by convention, figuring a statewide vote was more likely to favor Repeal than legislatures often gerrymandered to favor more socially-conservative rural voters. I would let Congress keep that authority.
It might be worth knowing if anything happened before the ratification of the 27th amendment that would have violated it had it been in effect earlier. The amendment is unobjectionable, but its having taken so long to have been ratified suggests that it was a solution looking for a problem.