There is of course the 20 year rule so as much as possible I will avoid discussion of anything beyond 2000.

Firstly, I want to establish that it isn't as difficult to amend the US constitution as one might think. While there have only been 27 amendments, we typically see them happen every 20-40 years or so. The longest gap between amendments so far was between the 12th amendment (1804 on presidential & VP election procedures), and the 13th amendment (abolishing some forms of slavery). This was a gap of 60 years. As noted however we typically see them more regularly than that. If we get to the early 2030s and there hasn't been another amendment, then we'll be in 'unusual' territory, in terms of how often they happen.

The process of actually doing it, in simple terms, involves two thirds of the Senate and the House supporting the amendment proposal. Once that has occurred, Congress skips the President and then three quarters (3/4) of the states must also pass the proposal at a state level. The President has no involvement in the process and cannot introduce, veto, or really have say whatsoever, not even to ratify an amendment. Of course, if a President does want an Amendment, they will simply have their party in Congress introduce it, but that's the end of their formal involvement.

Now, this is difficult, but there are far more difficult Constitutional amendment processes. For instance, in Denmark, the parliament must approve an amendment proposal. Then, once the amendment proposal has been passed, a general election must be held, and the new parliament must then also approve the constitutional amendment. And then, a referendum is held where the amendment must receive not only an absolute majority of the vote, but the "yes" votes must also be at least 40% of the overall electorate. Australia also has a notoriously difficult amendment process, so difficult that constitutional amendments simply aren't considered realistic in Australian constitutional jurisprudence scholarship.

In order to amend the Australian constitution, parliament must approve a proposal. Then there is a referendum which must be passed by a majority of voters. However, a majority of voters is not enough, as there also has to be a majority of voters in a majority of states. Therein lies the difficulty. Of thirteen constitutional amendments that were supported by a majority of Australian voters, five did not have the support of enough states. In the remarkable case of the 1977 constitutional amendment, a huge 62% of voters nationwide approved the amendment. At the time, however, they needed voters in 4/6 states to also approve the amendment. This meant that the minority states were able to block an amendment despite overwhelming public support. This happens regularly in Australian amendments, and after occurring twice in the early 1980s, is a process that has largely been abandoned as being pointless to attempt unless there is essentially unanimous support between both parties and the general public.

In the United States, this is not the case. Successfully amending the Constitution is a process that generally requires practical concerns among politicians and the political will to address them to coincide with mass support or campaigning around an issue. This type of "issue alignment" usually occurs at least once every 3-4 decades. Those constitutional aficionados reading this might say, "Ah, but Yazman - the 27th Amendment is different because it started in the 1780s, so really the last "proper" amendment was in the 1970s". I'd like to use the passage of the 27th amendment as a case study to answer your question because as an amendment it is uniquely positioned to encompass the circumstances surrounding amendments across all of American history, from the revolutionary era through to the MC Hammer era. The 27th amendment allows us to see all the stages of an amendment occur in both eras as well as how an amendment fails to pass, and how an amendment DOES pass, all at once.

For those of you that aren't familiar with the 27th Amendment, this is the most recent Amendment and it came into force in 1992, and it took over 200 years for 3/4 of states to ratify it. In short, the successful ratification of this amendment means that members of Congress cannot increase or decrease their salaries during their term - salary changes can only come into effect once an election has occurred. This amendment was the result of an undergraduate economics student writing an assignment about long-since ignored amendment that failed to gain any ratifications by states in the 1790s after 7 states had ratified it. The student, Gregory Watson, after writing his assignment began a campaign to try to get states to ratify it. It took him around 10 years, but eventually by 1992 30 states had passed it.

This amendment originally passed Congress because of a combination of things. The post-revolutionary American public had much frustration with what Richard B. Bernstein noted was the 'apparent and real corruption' of the British parliament, where vote-buying, pork barreling, and even outright purchase and sale of seats had been occurring. Revolutionaries believed this sort of corruption was part of what led Parliament in the first place to violate their rights. Subsequently there was a lot of effort devoted to the property rights of members of Congress, who would pay them, and how much they would be paid. Beyond public demands, there was also much ongoing debate about how members of Congress should be compensated, so the idea having so much political force among the general public bolstered the existing practical concerns of Congress. As a result this amendment ended up being proposed and passed.

At the time however this amendment just wasn't important or relevant enough for enough States to ratify it, as there were ongoing debates between Federalists and anti-Federalists, and how the very country itself was to be structured. Many states were just not interested in this issue, and openly rejected it as a necessary matter to deal with given the issues of the day that were seen as far more important. As a result, 6 states adopted it and five openly opposed its passage, making it impossible to pass.

Why didn't it ever really come up again? Well, Congress tended to be responsible with its own compensation, although Bernstein notes that in 1817 an attempt in Congress to pass a radical increase in salary due to a switch in rate from per diem to per annum was so extremely unpopular to the extent that new compensation laws were not attempted again until nearly 40 years later, in 1855. In 1873 there was another massive public outcry when Congress passed legislation increasing members' salary by two thirds. The public outcry was strong enough that it led to the Ohio General Assembly ratifying the compensation amendment to show their outrage.

This issue faded away as Congress became more responsible again with its own compensation in subsequent decades, but by the 1950s public resentment of Congress increasing its own salary began to become a real political issue. Not a major one dominating the radio waves necessarily, but a significant issue. And every time Congress increased its own salary, public resentment about the matter grew. And oh boy did Congress increase its salary a lot during the Cold War. Congressional Quarterly's Guide to Congress shows the figures over time. From 1955 to 1985, the salary of members of Congress increased from ~$22,500 per year to $75,100 per year. The public became increasingly unhappy about this issue.

And then in parliament as a result they struggled during the Cold War decades with how to actually handle it. There were Congressional & Presidential commissions, legislative regime after legislative regime, and just overall difficulty. The Supreme Court had even intervened in INS v Chadha. Senator Robert C. Byrd once remarked on this issue that the Congress would "undoubtedly continue to struggle with the salary issue as Congress moves into its third century" and that public opposition to congressional pay increases would continue to rise. Senator Byrd foresaw that this was an issue that had to be addressed, and soon.

So when our undergraduate student needed a topic to write his assignment about, he found this long-since forgotten constitutional amendment which didn't have a ratification deadline written in. That meant that in 1982 it was still possible for it to be ratified by more states. Watson began campaigning, and built a national letter-writing movement to convince states to ratify the 27th Amendment. Maine was the first state to do this in 1983, followed by Colorado. The level of resentment about congressional compensation increases was significant enough as well that Watson was able to rally conservatives and liberals to his cause, during the Cold War, under the Reagan presidency. A popular movement had begun, and one by one, they managed to convince 30 states to pass it. Of course, the States were well aware of the constant debate and outrage surrounding the issue, and the Federal government's constant struggle with it.

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