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1. It is not irrelevant that the Bill of Rights submitted to the states in 1789 included not only what are now the first ten Amendments, but also two others. Indeed, what we call the First Amendment was only the third one of the list submitted to the states. The initial “first amendment” in fact concerned the future size of the House of Representatives, a topic of no small importance to the Anti-Federalists, who were appalled by the smallness of the House seemingly envisioned by the Philadelphia framers. The second prohibited any pay raise voted by members of Congress to themselves from taking effect until an election “shall have intervened.” See J. Goebel, 1 The Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States: Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801, at 442 n.162 (1971). Had all of the initial twelve proposals been ratified, we would, it is possible, have a dramatically different cognitive map of the Bill of Rights. At the very least, one would neither hear defenses of the “preferred” status of freedom of speech framed in terms of the “firstness” of (what we know as) the First Amendment, nor the wholly invalid inference drawn from that “firstness” of some special intention of the Framers to safeguard the particular rights laid out there.

   – Sanford Levinson. “The Embarrassing Second Amendment”. Yale Law Journal. 1989.

   printable PDF: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7254&context=ylj

   HTML: https://guncite.com/journals/embar.html

   1. “The second prohibited any pay raise voted by members of Congress to themselves from taking effect until an election ‘shall have intervened.'”

      FYI – the original second amendment was ratified as the 27th amendment in 1992.

2. Apropos Congresscritters and their pay, a friend sent me this:

   Salary of retired US Presidents .. . . . .. . . . . .. . $180,000 FOR LIFE.

   Salary of House/Senate members .. . . . .. . . . $174,000 FOR LIFE. This is stupid

   Salary of Speaker of the House .. . . . .. . . . . $223,500 FOR LIFE. This is really stupid

   Salary of Majority / Minority Leaders . . .. . . . .$193,400 FOR LIFE Stupid

   Average Salary of a teacher . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. .$40,065

   Average Salary of a deployed Soldier . . .. . . .. $38,000

   Congressional Reform Act of 2022

   1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman / woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office.

   2. Congress (past, present, & future) participates in Social Security.

   All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.

   3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

   4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

   5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

   6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

   7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 3/1/22. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

   Congress made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and go back to work.

   Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, offers one of the best quotes about the debt ceiling:

   “I could end the deficit in five minutes,” he told CNBC. “You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

   The 26th Amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only three months and eight days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 – before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

   Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took one (1) year or less to become the law of the land – all because of public pressure.

   Carry on

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