On March 3, 1873, Congress gave itself a 50% raise, made it retroactive, and paid it out in cash to members who had just been voted out of office. The fallout took 119 years to fully play out.

It happened on the very last day of the session.

Congress was rushing to pass a big appropriations bill to keep the government running. Tucked inside was a provision pushed by Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler. It raised the salary of members of Congress from $5,000 a year to $7,500.

That alone would have been controversial. But the raise was also made retroactive, back to the start of the term two years earlier. That meant every member walked away with a $5,000 lump sum in back pay. At a time when most American workers made a few hundred dollars a year, that was a fortune.

And it went to everyone, including the lame ducks. Dozens of members who had lost their elections and were leaving office the next day collected their bonus on the way out the door.

The same bill doubled the president's salary from $25,000 to $50,000, and raised pay for Supreme Court justices and cabinet members. Because the raises were attached to a bill funding the government, President Grant signed it. His second term started the next day.

The public exploded.

Newspapers called it the Salary Grab and the Back Pay Steal. Editorial cartoons showed congressmen stuffing their pockets. Church groups, farm organizations, and town meetings denounced it. Some members got so much heat back home that they returned the money to the Treasury or gave it away to charity, trying to save their careers.

It didn't help much. The country was also reeling from the Crédit Mobilier railroad bribery scandal, and later that year the Panic of 1873 kicked off a brutal depression. Voters were in no mood.

When the new Congress met, one of the first things it did was repeal the raise, except for the president and the Supreme Court. In the 1874 elections, the Republicans lost control of the House in one of the biggest swings of the century.

But one state decided to go further.

In 1873, Ohio dug up a constitutional amendment that had been sitting around since 1789. James Madison had proposed it as part of the original Bill of Rights. It said that any pay raise Congress votes for itself can't take effect until after the next election. It hadn't gotten enough states back then, and it had been basically forgotten. Ohio ratified it as a protest.

It still didn't get enough states. It went back to collecting dust.

Then in 1982, a sophomore at the University of Texas named Gregory Watson wrote a paper about it for a government class. He argued it was technically still alive because it had no deadline. His professor gave him a C.

Watson was so annoyed that he started a one-man letter-writing campaign to state legislatures. It worked. State after state ratified it. In 1992, more than 200 years after Madison wrote it, it became the 27th Amendment to the Constitution.

In 2017, the University of Texas officially changed Watson's grade to an A.

It's called the Salary Grab of 1873, and almost nobody learns about it.


https://x.com/EchoesofWarYT/st.../2112334352268886147

Thanks, first I have heard of it.