Why did it take so long to ratify the 27th amendment?

Factual Questions
1

The 27th amendment (if congress votes itself a pay raise, then that won’t take effect till after the next election) was famously proposed by James Madison in 1789 in the same proposal along with the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. Congress approved it in 1789 but the states didn’t ratify it until 1992. Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia

But why not? That seems like such an obviously good law that why would any state not ratify it? It clearly wasn’t because the states just didn’t know about it – that exact same proposal had the other 10 amendments of the Bill of Rights and all the states approved those by 1791 but for some reason they explicitly decided not to approve this one. Why not? Why was this amendment controversial but the 4th or 6th amendment weren’t?

2

My guess is that as states are admitted, they didn’t think to ratify pending amendments that were sent to the states before they were admitted.

3

Five state original passed the rest of the bill of rights but didn’t vote for the 27th (then 2nd) amendment:
New Jersey
New Hampshire
New York
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
Accord to this site: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/resources/bor/themes/amendments-and-states-that-got-away/ there’s not really any records from the time debating the issue so we don’t really know why they didn’t pass it. To venture a guess, many of the men in the state legislatures at the time were probably thinking about running for Congress and didn’t want to restrict their own future salary.

4

There were/are a bunch of amendments that the states never got around to ratifying. My personal favorite was an amendment to give the Congress the right to make laws regulating child labor, proposed in 1924. Some of the others are downright scary.

5

The Wikipedia article you cited points out that some states felt that it was not needed, and others wanted a different solution. I don’t know that you’re going to get a deeper answer than that unless you dig through original records of the debates on what became The Bill of Rights. The fact that there are other solutions and that not all countries include that kind of limitations certainly point to it not being necessary, even if it is a good idea, and no one felt strongly enough about it to keep pushing for it. After the initial debate was over, it was just forgotten about until Gregory Watson got pissed off about his term paper grade and started making noise.

6

Most histories of the Bill of Rights gloss over ratification in a sentence or two. Here is an article from the Santa Clara Law Review which discusses the matter at some length, beginning on Page 920. It doesn’t address the OP’s question directly, but provides some tantalizing hints of an answer.

As the article notes,

This is one reason for the paucity of historical attention. However, the author then goes on to discuss the debates in Massachusetts and Virginia in some detail. In Massachusetts, the Senate approved amendments 3 through 12 and the House approved 3 through 11.

But, antifederalists in both houses were dissatisfied because the Bill of Rights didn’t go far enough. They appointed a Joint Committee to recommend additional amendments. The Committee recommended twelve, one of which provided that “the states should pay the salaries of federal senators and representatives”.

Context: The notion that the federal government should pay members of Congress was novel in 1789, and not universally accepted, especially by Antifederalists and lukewarm federalists. Under the Articles of Confederation, states had paid members of Congress. This hadn’t worked well; states were broke during the 1780’s and salaries and expense allowances arrived late or not at all. As this site discusses, this is one of the reasons the Confederation Congress (1781-89) had chronic attendance problems. However from an Antifederalist viewpoint, this was a feature and not a bug. If Congress couldn’t muster a quorum, it couldn’t pass obnoxious laws to increase its own power.

So Antifederalists appear to have disliked the Salary Amendment because it “improved” a concept that they wanted to eliminate, namely federal salaries for Congress.

By now you may be wondering, how is it possible that both houses in Massachusetts approved amendments 3 through 11, when every history book says that Massachusetts didn’t ratify the Bill of Rights until 1939? Ah but remember, the Bill of Rights was the first, last, and only time in American history that Congress proposed Constitutional amendments en bloc. The states considered them en bloc. The MA Senate passed a resolution approving ten amendments, and the House nine, and the two houses never reconciled the difference, so as far as Massachusetts was concerned they never properly ratified anything. So they reported to the federal government, and so matters stood.

A similar process took place in Connecticut. So dislike of the Salary Amendment and the Reapportionment Amendment not only sank those two amendments, it delayed (and could have prevented) ratification of the other ten as well.

The Santa Clara article cites a five-volume opus called Roots of the Bill of Rights, published in 1971, which I will try to track down and see if it sheds any additional light.

7

I read some of the debates (sorry no cite) and it seems that many people worried that the Congressman would set the pay too low in an attempt to only have the independently wealthy being able to afford to be in Congress and shutting out the little guy from running. So, if this amendment had passed, the little guy could run for Congress knowing that his pay wouldn’t be diminished during his term of office and that if such a law passed, he could simply not run again but continue to serve without going bankrupt. It seems that the votes against this amendment were from the wealthy guys who planned on doing exactly what was feared.

8

Did the first congress think it was a pointless amendment because of the high rate of incumbents getting re-elected? It’s at most a two year weight for the majority of representatives, and most of the senate will be eligible in their current term. Obviously they didn’t have the experience of the high re-election rate in the very first congress, but there have been quite a few since then demonstrating the pattern.

9

Because it wasn’t until 1982 that Gregory Watson was given the C grade that initiated his crusade.

It’s a long-standing principle in American politics that a Constitutional amendment has little chance of being ratified unless it gets the support of an undergraduate student.

10

On September 22, 1789, just three days before Congress sent the Bill of Rights to the states, President Washington signed into law the first law setting salaries for members of Congress. The law established a rather modest pay of $6 per day in attendance for members of both houses, plus a mileage allowance of 30 cents per mile travelled from home to the capital. For a typical session of perhaps 150 working days, this would represent an annual salary of about $900, as compared to pay for Cabinet members which ran between $1,500 and $3,000 per year.

Unlikely. In the early Congresses, between 25% and 45% of members of the House would decline to seek reelection after every term. Turnover was high.

The votes which sank the amendment were cast in state legislatures. It seems unlikely that legislators were imagining a two-step: “I’m going to get promoted to Congress, then lower the salary so that only my fellow rich get in as well.”

Of course, it’s possible, maybe even probable, that not every legislator who voted “no” did so for the same reason. Some may have thought the amendment unnecessary, because Congress had already shown admirable restraint in setting its pay. Some may have wanted higher pay and didn’t want to prevent Congress from raising it. The fact, however, that the same New York legislature which voted down the amendment recommended returning payroll decisions to the states leads me to think that that was an important factor, at least in New York.

11

There is almost no scholarship and no records of the debates in state legislatures as to why the first two amendments (apportionment and pay) were rejected. However, from what we do have, the fear was that states might try to subvert the brand new national government. As you note, it was debated whether to have the states pay their own Congressmen, but then decided to have the national government do it lest the states refuse to pay or otherwise try to subvert the process.

While today we think of Congress enriching themselves at the expense of the public, back then the concern was getting able bodied people in place and having the new government function properly. You may be correct (as your guess is as good as any historian) that people voted “no” for different reasons. as that happens today on many bills. Take a bill outlawing abortion in except in cases of rape, incest or to save the mother’s life. The pro-choice crowd will vote against, but many on the pro-life side would also vote against because they don’t like the rape exception.

But you are right. The hole in my theory is that once the amendment was rejected, you didn’t see Congress lower the pay so that only the wealthy could serve. But maybe because that amendment was out there, only one or two states short of ratification, that made them leery of doing it. However, to your direct point, I don’t think any state legislator was thinking of your hypothetical two step process; the rich state legislator might have thought it desirable that only wealthy men should be in Congress

ETA: In short, today we think of high Congressional pay as a public rip off. Back then, they largely felt that it was a good thing so that regular people could take time away from their affairs and be able to serve without financial hardship.