Opinion ID: 675081
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Quadrennial Pay Adjustment

Text: 28 The Congress also provided in the Ethics Reform Act that a presidential recommendation arising from a quadrennial pay adjustment commission shall not take effect until it has been approved by an Act of Congress signed by the President (or otherwise become law) and an election of Representatives has thereafter been held, 2 U.S.C. Sec. 359(2)(A) & (4)(A), but not before January 1 of the year following that election. 2 U.S.C. Sec. 362(2) (proposed effective date of a pay adjustment may occur no earlier than January 1 of the second fiscal year following the year in which the Commission makes its proposal). Mr. Boehner challenges this system as a violation of the twenty-seventh amendment because it would permit a pay adjustment to take effect before the Congress that approved it has expired, so that a member of that Congress may benefit from it. 29 We decline to rule upon the merits of this challenge, which is far from ripe. No quadrennial adjustment has been proposed or enacted; indeed, because the Congress cancelled the first quadrennial pay adjustment commission under the Ethics Reform Act, no such adjustment is scheduled to occur under the Act until 1999. See 2 U.S.C. Sec. 352(8)(B). Even then this claim will not be ripe until a Congress votes in an election year (i.e., in 1998 or an even-numbered year thereafter) to make a recommended pay adjustment effective prior to the seating of a new Congress, when the members of the enacting Congress could no longer benefit from the adjustment. The Act provides only that the pay adjustment may not occur earlier than the first day of January after an election, see 2 U.S.C. Sec. 362(2); nothing in the Act or elsewhere prevents the Congress from making the quadrennial adjustment effective upon the seating of the new Congress later that month, thereby avoiding altogether the constitutional question Mr. Boehner would have us rush to resolve right now.