Amendment 27: Congressional pay raises will only take effect after the next election



No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of representatives shall have intervened.

This amendment is unique because it took an extremely long time for it to be ratified. It states the the pay or raises for the members of Congress do not fall into place until the next term. I believe this is important because money can play a large role politics, influencing, and voting, so this amendment aims to prevent that. For an amendment that took 200 years to be ratified it is still a largely untouched upon topic to this day. There are multiple examples of lobbying and all kinds of financial influence aimed to gain some sort of political agenda. We have to address any unfairness or alteration of our current political system to make sure that it stays as an effective representation of our nation.





Here we have an extremely interesting story of how the 27th amendment even came back centuries later to become our latest change to the Constitution. I was able to learn a lot about the amendment itself as well as it taking 38 states ratifying for it to become a part of the Constitution. This is an increasingly looked at topic now due to the amount of money moving around in politics and this prevents complete disregard from happening. It also makes me think about any other amendments that are obvious changes that we have just not brought to light.



For the last video we take it back to Hip because I was still a bit confused on exactly how the "compensation" applied but he explains it perfectly here. Basically any gains or raises the politicians were to gain are not given until they successfully been re-elected. This way they cannot give themselves raises during their elected terms, which would be obviously unfair. Hip also touches on the timeline from the 1700s to 1992 for this to come to fruition. That is an extremely long time, but note that politics were not always as financially driven. This is an important one to keep politicians honest and interested in the betterment of our nation and not the fattening of their wallets. 

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