Jack of Harts

The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was the first of twelve amendments proposed to the Constitution. The last ten were approved and became the Bill of Rights. The second, concerning changing how Representatives were apportioned, failed to be passed, but the general idea was later enacted through legislation. The first fell out of thought and memory and languished as one of the failed amendments for nearly two hundred years. A college student decided to write a paper for his government class about this amendment in 1982, and said it could still be passed because it had no end-date in it. He turned that paper into a national campaign and it moved through the States until it was passed in 1992, over two centuries after it was proposed. What does it do? It states that no law changing how much a Senator or Representative makes is allowed to take effect until after the next national election. And so passes the story of both the strangest but also most simple and common sensical of our amendments.