The 27th Amendment Took 202 Years to Ratify Because of a College Term Paper

James Madison wrote the amendment in 1789 as one of twelve proposed constitutional changes that became the Bill of Rights. Ten of them were ratified by 1791. The eleventh failed. The twelfth was peculiar: it stipulated that any law changing the compensation of senators and representatives could not take effect until after the next election of representatives. Six states ratified before 1800, then nothing for almost a century, except for an Ohio ratification in 1873 during a backlash to a congressional pay raise.

In 1982, Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, was researching a paper on government for a political science class. He noticed that the 1789 amendment had no ratification deadline and was, technically, still pending before the states. He wrote his term paper arguing it could still be ratified. His teaching assistant, Sharon Waite, gave him a C. Watson appealed to the professor and lost.

He decided to make the C wrong. From a small apartment in Austin he wrote letters to state legislators across the country, asking them to push the amendment forward. Maine ratified in 1983. Colorado in 1984. By 1992, 38 states had voted yes — exactly the three-fourths required by Article V. Michigan provided the decisive vote on May 7, 1992.

The Archivist of the United States certified the 27th Amendment on May 18, 1992, and Congress, after some grumbling about whether such an old proposal could still take effect, voted in concurrence. The full ratification process had taken 202 years, 7 months, and 12 days, the longest in U.S. history. Watson got a public acknowledgement from Speaker Foley. In 2017, his old professor went back to UT Austin and amended the C to an A.